We got some exciting adaptation news buried in a Deadline post about some business shakings in Hollywood.
The article is centered around the story that Ryan Reynolds’ production company, Maximum Effort, has renewed its first look deal with Paramount Pictures. The last paragraph, however, shares that Maximum Entertainment and Paramount are working on an adaptation of John Scalzi’s Starter Villain, with Jesse Andrews, whose previous credits include Pixar’s Luca and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, on board to pen the script.
Starter Villain came out in September 2023 and, in addition to having one of the best covers in recent history (check it out above), is described thusly on Goodreads:
Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.
Charlie’s life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.
But becoming a supervillain isn’t all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they’re coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.
It’s up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.In a dog-eat-dog world… be a cat.
I confess that I haven’t read Starter Villain (yet), but the idea of Reynolds potentially playing Charlie (something that admittedly is far from confirmed) and talking to hyperintelligent spy cats is exciting. No news yet on if/when this project will make it to the production stage, but fingers crossed we’ll see this on the big screen in the near future.
