Deadpool’s Tim Miller has been tapped to direct an adaptation of Alien Legion for Warner Bros.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. has picked up the rights to Alien Legion, a science-fiction comic series created for Marvel’s Epic Comics imprint in 1983 by Carl Potts, Alan Zelentz, and Frank Cirocco.
Miller, who directed 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate and a handful of episodes of Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots series in addition to 2016’s Deadpool, has signed on to direct the adaptation, while Don Murphy, Susan Montford, and Aaron Ryder will serve as producers.
What is Alien Legion about?
In the comics, Alien Legion follows a military unit known as Force Nomad, which Potts has previously described as “the [French] Foreign Legion in space.”
Potts told Popimage in 2001, “It was inspired by true foreign legion history where the best and the worst of all the world’s cultures/races are put into pressure cooker situations. Then I created the humanoid/serpentine design that later became Sarigar and decided that the Legion should include a wide variety of species. This was in the early ’70s. By the time I got around to developing the idea further in the early ’80s, Star Wars obviously became an influence.”
Hollywood has attempted to adapt Alien Legion before. Potts initially wrote a screenplay for an Alien Legion television series for MGM in the mid-1990s. The property was later offered to Dimension Films and MainFrame Studios before producer Jerry Bruckheimer got ahold of it for The Walt Disney Company in 2009.
At one point, Game of Thrones’ David Benioff was hired to work on Alien Legion and turned in three drafts of a script before he was taken off the project. The project ultimately never saw the light of day at Disney and the rights reverted back to Potts, who has now found a new home for the property at Warner Bros.
