'Sgt. Rock' Fighting a Slightly Futuristic War, Damn It

This is getting out of hand. First, Battleship is some kind of alien invasion movie instead of a WWII naval battle, and now Sgt. Rock, one of the most durable and recognizable DC Comics characters, is trading in his K-rations for an iPad.

Sarge was in print for almost 30 straight years and has made a few comebacks over the past two decades, but he's so indelibly identified as a WWII soldier in Easy Company that starting away from that story just boggles the mind. I get it if you reboot him down the road or something, but for the first movie, you're just going to do away with the history? Producer Joel Silver has tried and tried to get this project in front of cameras for a long, long time, and now he thinks he's cracked it: No WWII, even though that is the character's history and audiences still enjoy contemporary stories from that war.

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'Sgt. Rock' Won't Be Set in World War II

No, this isn't what we need: Sgt. Rock is heading to the future. The Hollywood Reporter says the DC Comics series, in various stages of non-development for quite a while, is getting a fresh start with I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence.

At one point, Guy Ritchie was in talks for this one, but producers Joel Silver and Akiva Goldsman have settled on Lawrence, who will be working from a script by newcomer Chad St. John. It's not immediately clear if a move to the future means just bringing Sarge out of World War II and into a contemporary environment or if this will actually be futuristic in some way. Regardless, it's the wrong approach.

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Update on Guy Ritchie's Possible Next Moves

I'm not wholly committed to this Guy Ritchie Revival thing. I loved Rocknrolla, true, but I think giving him the keys to Sherlock Holmes is kind of like letting the tram driver at Universal Studios race a Formula One car, or vice versa. Big question mark there for me.

And I had forgotten that mega-producer Joel Silver and Mrs. Robert Downey Jr., producer Susan Downey (whose name is on both Rocknrolla and Sherlock Holmes) were already working with Ritchie on a couple movies before Sherlock that might even make less sense to you.Thankfully, Downey reminded us all what those projects were in a conversation with Coming Soon:

"Joel and I had done RocknRolla with Guy and he really wanted to get behind the camera again, which is how RocknRolla came about because prior to that, we had been developing these bigger, sort of tentpole event movies for Warner Bros. that he was wanting to do, but those take time, especially if you're going to do something that is a known title, whether it is Dirty Dozen or Sgt. Rock.

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Guy Ritchie to Direct 'Sgt. Rock'?

Could Guy Ritchie get an assist in his career rebound from producer Joel Silver? If Silver has anything to do with it, yeah, probably.

In a sitdown with Moriarty at Ain't It Cool, Silver spent about thislong on the DC Comics adaptation, spending the bulk of his time talking about his new release, Speed Racer. After all, he's a producer; would you expect it to be the other way around? Discussing Silver's penchant for holding on to the rights of unmade movies for decades - and Speed Racer falls in that category - Moriarity offered, "But you do that with properties. You stick by them, like Sgt. Rock. You have developed that for a long time now," to which Silver replied, "I'm going to make that very soon. With Guy Ritchie, I think."

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