Back when I was in college, I had a friend who collected comic books. What made this story slightly less common was his choice of medium. At a time where you still needed a dot-edu email address to create a Facebook account, my friend had a vast collection of digital comics. One day, as a study break, he handed me a disc filled with hundreds of full comic book series he thought I might enjoy. One was Brian K. Vaughan‘s much-beloved “Y: The Last Man” series. Another? Vaughan’s just-as-impressive “Ex Machina” run.
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“Ex Machina,” a series about a superhero politician who helps prevent the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, offers readers a delightful blend of political commentary and superpowered fight sequences. And if The Hollywood Reporter is to be believed, unlike “Y: The Last Man,” it might end up on the screen sometime this century. Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel, the screenwriters behind 2019’s “Seberg,” will tackle the project for Legendary Entertainment. Given the, uh, apparent title conflict with another high-profile science-fiction film, “Ex Machina” will also be retitled as “The Great Machine.”
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As noted in The Hollywood Reporter, the project is a long-time favorite of Legendary executive Cale Boyter. Boyter, who previously worked on “Ex Machina” when New Line owned it, was instrumental in acquiring the rights to the comic book series after the rights reverted to Vaughan and artist Tony Harris. While this makes “Ex Machina” or “The Great Machine” something of an aberration for Legendary Entertainment – they tend to focus their more-expensive efforts on giant monster features like “Jurassic World” and “Godzilla” – it isn’t often that an executive can take a crack at a project from two different studios. Vaughan and Harris have faith in Boyter to do their comic justice, which should give fans of the series hope.