The sixteenth issue of The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's sci-fi comic book series OBLIVION SONG hits store shelves today, and coinciding with the release of that issue comes the news that Kirkman's production company Skybound Entertainment is teaming up with Universal Pictures to develop an OBLIVION SONG movie.
Published by Skybound and Image Comics, the comic series is written by Kirkman and illustrated by Lorenzo De Felici. This is how Kirkman described the story to Entertainment Weekly last year:
The premise is that 300,000 people in the city of Philadelphia were on a land mass that basically switched places with a land mass in a different dimension that eventually came to be known as Oblivion. Our story takes place 10 years after this incident and follows a scientist, Nathan Cole, who invented technology that allows him to pass between dimensions. He was tasked with leading a strike team that would go into Oblivion and rescue people, but as they started catching fewer and fewer people, the government eventually shut the program down and stopped funding it. Because his brother is still left in Oblivion, Nathan kind of keeps his equipment running on like a tape-and-chewing-gum budget, and keeps going into Oblivion every day to try and find more and more people until he hopefully finds him."
I haven't read any OBLIVION SONG comics, but a quick look over some of the artwork shows me that this Oblivion dimension is full of strange creatures, including large monsters that our hero seems to have frequent, dangerous run-ins with.
Sean O'Keefe, who wrote the video games Pursuit Force and Lair as well as the upcoming Peter Berg / Mark Wahlberg film WONDERLAND (and back in the '90s worked as a producer's assistant on I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER), is writing the screenplay.
The OBLIVION SONG movie will be produced by Skybound's Kirkman, David Alpert, Bryan Furst, and Sean Furst. Universal EVP Production Jon Mone and director of development Lexi Barta will be overseeing the project for the studio.