Joey Soloway’s forthcoming adaptation of the sword-and-sorcery character Red Sonja just got a writer: newcomer Tasha Huo, who’s currently working on an animated adaptation of Tomb Raider for Netflix.
The character first appeared in Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comics in 1973—roughly inspired by Robert E. Howard’s character Red Sonya of Rogatino (who wasn’t introduced in the same world as Howard’s famous Conan stories). She’s been a fixture in comics ever since, rebooted by Dynamite Comics in 2005, and star of her own film in 1985 (pictured above), which also costarred Conan the Barbarian actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as High Lord Kalidor.
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A reboot of the film has been in the works for several years now: Rose McGowan as originally slated to star as the character in 2010 (to be directed by Robert Rodriguez), but dropped out after an injury. In 2017, Millennium Films announced that it would be adapting the character, with an eye towards setting up a new franchise, and would eventually hire Bryan Singer to helm the film.
However, Singer became embroiled in a series of misconduct and sexual assault allegations, prompting Millennium to delay production on the project and eventually fire him. The studio quickly found a replacement: Joey Soloway, who earned acclaim with their Amazon series Transparent. Now, the project is inching forward with Huo, who’ll pen the screenplay. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project will soon begin casting.
Huo is a new screenwriter, but already has a handful of notable credits under her belt—she wrote Netflix’s upcoming The Witcher: Blood Origin prequel series and is showrunning and executive producing Netflix’s recently-announced Tomb Raider anime series. Given that Netflix is currently working on a Conan series, it’ll be interesting to see if they work in some sort of crossover.
