Jeymes Samuel to direct adaptation of Irredeemable comic for Netflix

Jupiter’s Legacy failed to take off at Netflix, but the streaming service will be damned if it doesn’t get some deconstructionist take on superheroes going! Amazon has The Boys, HBO Max has Peacemaker, Hulu probably has one as well, so why can’t Netflix have a thing that dares to ask “what if superheroes were actually bad?” Well, get ready for Irredeemable, Netflix’s adaptation of the Boom! series from Mark Waid and Peter Krause that’s more or less about exactly that.

The comic is based around a guy called The Plutonian (a Superman-type) who was once the world’s most beloved superhero but has since grown bitter and jaded, partially due to the fact that everyone has always respected him out of fear rather than actually liking who he is. So he eventually snaps and starts murdering people, like, a lot of people, and all of his former friends and enemies try and come up with ways to stop him.

Netflix will also be integrating the parallel story Incorruptible according to The Hollywood Reporter, which is sort of the reverse premise: A bad guy is so appalled by the violent actions of The Plutonian that he decides to try and become a good guy. Both storylines will be combined into one movie, which is being directed by The Harder They Fall’s Jeymes Samuel and will be written by One Night In Miami and Soul’s Kemp Powers. JAY-Z, who was a producer on The Harder They Fall, will also serve as a producer on this.

The original book has all of the scale of a regular superhero crossover event, with huge cosmic stakes and gigantic fight scenes with a wide array of costumed characters, so it will be interesting to how that translates to live-action on a Netflix budget—it will also be interesting to see if the movie retains the fact that The Plutonian’s nemesis, a Lex Luthor-type, is in love with him and does all of his evil scheming just to get attention. (That’s a deconstructionist superhero angle we legitimately don’t see that often!)