The Blumhouse team have been pushing out beyond horror for a while now, and has certainly embraced the superhero genre with the upcoming M Night Shyamalan sequel Glass. Now John Ridley will also be tackling the genre for the company, adapting his The American Way comics series into a film.
He originally created the concept with illustrator George Jeanty for their eponymous 2007 Vertigo graphic novel, which dealt with a team of 1960s superheroes called The Civil Defense. Made up of an ethnically diverse team, they battled supervillains and were beloved by a public unaware of their true mission: pacifying an American public inflamed by the times. Ridley and Jeanty followed that up with last year's six-issue miniseries subtitled Those Above And Those Below, which turned the clock forward to 1972, after the addition of black superhero Jason Fisher causes tension in the group, and the government creates a new character called Hellbent to cover up the chaos.
After the propaganda sham, different surviving members of the team are trying to make something of their lives, with Fisher trying to help the disenfranchised people of inner-city Baltimore, who are suspicious that he's a tool of the police. Ridley's film will draw from the follow-up, while keeping to the typically lower budget levels of Blumhouse productions. The company currently has Truth Or Dare on our screens, while Ridley has quietly been at work on a Marvel TV series that has yet to appear.
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