Last year we reported that Brett Ratner—essentially Homer and Hesiod if they were bickering buddy cops—was circling a new film about Hercules that was to be produced by action-movie guru Avi Lerner, the man who spent the 1990s filling Blockbuster shelves with the works of Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Dolph Lundgren. Not long after, Ratner begged off to do his all-black-and-then-decidedly-less-so-Ocean’s 11 movie, Tower Heist, leaving Lerner’s project essentially dead in the water.
But apparently Ratner never quite got over his infatuation with Hercules, and Vulture is now reporting that he is once again prepping a project based on the monster-killing muscle man: Based on Radical Publishing comic book Hercules: The Thracian Wars, it’s being adapted by Ryan Condal, who most recently transformed Paradise Lost into the 3-D kick-ass “aerial warfare” film that was always hiding behind Milton’s labored musings on sin and salvation. Fortunately, he won’t have much of that chaff to cut away here, as The Thracian Wars is pretty much all blood-on-the-sand action—and with the similar upcoming sequels to Clash Of The Titans and 300 and that Conan The Barbarian reboot, it seems we may be entering some sort of early-’80s swords-and-sandals renaissance. Wild guess: We’re about a week away from news of a Krull remake.