You know how it always seems as though Guillermo del Toro has a gazillion projects racing through his noggin and spewed out across various formats and production companies? Well, try a gazillion and one. Yes, the ever-prolific writer/producer/director/raconteur is at it again, setting up an adaptation of Monster, Naoki Urasawa’s respected Manga.
Monster, told over 18 volumes and already adapted into an anime, follows a young doctor on an obsessive quest to find an evil sociopath who plans to unleash genocide upon the world. The twist is that the monster in question is a 12 year-old boy whose life the doctor saved, making him partly responsible for what might happen.
Del Toro, working with Sherlock/Doctor Who scribe Steve Thompson (he wrote episodes such as The Curse Of The Black Spot for Who and The Reichenbach Fall for Sherlock) is set to adapt the story for HBO, with the pair crafting the pilot for del Toro to direct during, we assume, downtime from the 500 or so other things he’s doing at once.
Originally, the idea was to turn the story into a film for New Line, but the concept proved too sprawling for the confines of a movie’s running time. Game Of Thrones' home HBO has commissioned a pilot and, if successful, Thompson would run the eventual series.
In case you’d forgotten, del Toro has his latest monster project, Pacific Rim, due to land in UK cinemas on July 12. Check out the trailer below.