About eighteen months ago, Ron Howard was saying that he hoped to direct The Strange Adventures of HP Lovecraft, based on the Image Comics series by Mac Carter. Little has been heard about the project since, and Howard has presumably moved on, since he has the enormous journey to Stephen King's The Dark Tower ahead of him. But Lovecraft, like a Great Old One, still waits sleeping, and the latest rumour is that John August is taking a crack at the screenplay.
Carter's series put a reluctant Lovecraft front-and-centre in scenarios much like his own pioneering pulp fiction (Steven Soderbergh did something similar with Kafka, as did Nicholas Meyer with HG Wells in Time After Time), facing down the incomprehensible cosmic horrors of an indifferent universe like a 1930s, American Arthur Dent. Howard called the comics "challenging, original, psychologically interesting, and scary in a great way", and was apparently working from a script by Carter himself.
Carter is a USC graduate with some shorts and ads under his belt, but as a noob to feature films it's not surprising that his script might be in need of a revisit. August, long associated with Tim Burton - he wrote Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride, the upcoming Frankenweenie rejig and Monsterpocalypse - seems like he'd be on the right wavelength for the job. He's no stranger to comics either, taking a shot at a screenplay for the projected Preacher movie.
With no director currently aboard, there's no start date yet, so expect it to be a while before this one heads into production. In the meantime though, our Lovecraftian itches should be thoroughly scratched by Guillermo Del Toro's At the Mountains of Madness, due before cameras in the summer.