Every studio worth its salt needs a space franchise, no? Warner Bros. has taken a break from shelving finished films and announced plans for a new galactic adventure: The studio has picked up the rights to Alien Legion, with Deadpool’s Tim Miller signed on to direct.
Created by Carl Potts, Alan Zelenetz, and Frank Cirocco, the story is about a military unit, Force Nomad, which was conceived as “Foreign Legion in space.” The first Alien Legion comics were published (by Marvel’s Epic Comics imprint) in 1984, and it ran through the early ’90s. In 2014, Titan Comics published a four-issue series, but that seems to be the last we’ve heard of Force Nomad.
The characters of Force Nomad are… well, they’re a lot, to tell you the truth. There’s the half-man half-snake Captain Sarigar, who looks like a distant relative of Grand Admiral Thrawn; extremely wealthy human dude Torie Montroc; the wonderfully named and green-skinned Jugger Grimrod; redheaded badass and gymnast Corporal Tamara; a neat red froglike buddy named Specialist Meico; and the delightfully blobby Private Spellik. Also maybe a giant space bear, which is cool. If we get a space franchise with a space bear, I won’t be mad about it.
This is not the first time Hollywood has tried to make Alien Legion happen; producers Angry Films took the property to Dimension Films in the early 2000s, then had a moment with Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer later in the same decade. According to The Hollywood Reporter, that late-2000s crack at the Legion “had scripts written by David Benioff (Game of Thrones), and 3:10 to Yuma’s Derek Haas and Michael Brandt.”
It’s not yet known who will tackle the space-faring tale this time around.
