Earlier this year, it was announced that Keanu Reeves would be producing and starring in a live-action film based on his BOOM! Studios comic book BRZRKR, which centers on a character who looks just like Reeves and features some wonderfully over-the-top violence. Now Reeves has told the folks at Collider that the screenplay for the BRZRKR film is being written by Mattson Tomlin, who wrote the highly anticipated The Batman with Peter Craig and director Matt Reeves. Tomlin’s credits also include Little Fish and Project Power.
The BRZRKR film will be followed by an anime spin-off series that will “expand the BRZRKR universe by exploring different elements of the story”. Keanu Reeves is also producing the anime, and will be providing the voice of his character B for the show. Both BRZRKR projects are set up at Netflix, and Reeves had this to say about them:
We’re working with Netflix who have been very cool. They’re going to let us do an R-rated story which is cool. My ambition or hope is not to do a filmed version of the comic book so that they’ll have things in common, definitely the main character and his kind of rule set, but that we can take it to other places as well. We’re talking to a couple of different animation companies and trying to figure that out. And, again, for me I’m hoping to be inspired and influenced…there are some rules to the story, but I also want other creators to do their version of it. So I’m hoping to do a different version of a metaverse where in the sense having different storytellers with one set of rules but go other places with it. We’re working on trying to set up a company with the animation and we’ve hired a writer for the film Mattson Tomlin. He’s been cool and just starting to put things together. That’s where we’re at.”
A 12 issue limited series, BRZRKR is based on an original idea by Keanu Reeves, who also writes the comic book with Matt Kindt. (Pick up the first four issues HERE.) It tells the story of
an immortal warrior’s 80,000-year fight through the ages. The man known only as “B” is half-mortal and half-god, cursed and compelled to violence… even at the sacrifice of his sanity. But after wandering the earth for centuries, B may have finally found a refuge – working for the U.S. government to fight the battles too violent and too dangerous for anyone else. In exchange, B will be granted the one thing he desires – the truth about his endless blood-soaked existence… and how to end it.
We’ve heard that the comic shows B doing things like making a man’s head explode with one punch and murdering another man with a chunk of his own ribcage. Hopefully things like that make it into the live-action movie as well.
Reeves is producing these Netflix projects alongside BOOM! Studios’ Ross Richie and Stephen Christy, as well as Company Films’ Stephen Hamel. BOOM!’s Adam Yoelin is executive producing.