As part of Hollywood’s campaign to burn through every available comic book property inside of a decade, Lionsgate has turned its attention to Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti’s mid-aughts graphic novel The Monolith. As originally published by DC Comics over the course of 12 issues released from April 2004 to March 2005, the story is a modern take on the the Jewish myth of the golem.
In this retelling, a recovering drug addict inherits and moves into her grandmother’s old house in Brooklyn. She quickly discovers that the residence is still home to an enormous creature that her grandmother helped bring into existence back in the 1930s to avenge the death of an innocent man. Eventually, The Monolith is inadvertently unleashed upon the trendy New York borough, and its inheritor is left struggling to control not only it, but her own addictions.
The film adaptation is being written by newcomer Barnett Brettler, who has no major credits to date, but won the Sloan Prize for Screenwriting in 2013 for his original script Waking Hours, set in a dystopian future in which people are losing the ability to fall asleep. This film will also represent the first directing gig for Dave Wilson, who has worked on a visual effects for a number of films, including Avengers: Age Of Ultron, and is currently the creative director for Blur Studio, which concocted the memorable opening title sequence for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Hopefully, this project won’t prove to be too massive and unwieldy and Brettler and Wilson. It would be a shame if they lost control of it, and it ran amok through the superhero genre landscape, laying waste to all in its path.