Rob Liefeld is the co-creator of Deadpool, and though his other creations haven’t been as impactful or lasting as the Merc With A Mouth or his popular X-Force series, he’s still famous for essentially defining the feet-less, grotesquely muscled, pouch-covered superhero aesthetic of the ’90s—a style to which he’s still dedicated, even if every comics fan on the internet is constantly snickering about it. A few months ago, we reported that Paramount had picked up the rights to Liefeld’s Avengeyne with Akiva Goldsman hoping to produce and possibly direct a movie adaptation, but it’s not the only Liefeld movie project that’s currently in the works.
According to The Wrap, Goldsman and China’s Fundamental Films have now teamed up to pick up the film rights to Liefeld’s “Extreme Universe,” which is a brand from Image Comics that encompasses “nine comic book titles and nearly 100 characters” that all have names like Bloodstrike, Re-Gex, Battlestone, DeathSkull, Bloodwulf, Cybrid, and Killabunga (only two of which we just made up). Goldsman is setting up a writers’ room to start figuring out what an Extreme Universe movie might look like, and the hope is that he’ll be able to stretch it into a “multi-film franchise.”
The fact that nobody other than Marvel has been able to pull that off yet should be a little alarming for Goldman and Fundamental Films, but Liefeld and Image Comics did successfully take on the big comic book studios for a while there in the ’90s. If moviegoers are really hungry for big muscles and superfluous pouches, maybe they’ll be able to do it again.