Screenwriters love Satan, both in the sense that he’s a fascinating character and in that they secretly worship him from the darkest corners of their local coffee shops. Luckily, movie studios love Satan just as much (again, both ways), so it seems like you can always count on someone somewhere to bite on a script that is at least tangentially related to hell. Warner Bros. is the latest studio to take such a bite, as Deadline is reporting that it has just bought a pitch from writer Dwain Worrell titled Dante’s Inferno that is, unsurprisingly, based on Dante’s Inferno.
Deadline says Warner Bros. was “excited by [the script’s] scale and franchise potential,” and it will reportedly focus on Dante as he “descends through the nine circles of hell to save the woman he loves.” Now, our Italian is a little rusty, but we don’t remember the original Inferno actually being much of a love story. It was more of a road trip adventure about Dante and Virgil looking at a bunch of freaky stuff while becoming closer to God. Our familiarity with video game storylines is definitely not rusty, though, and we remember “Dante descends into hell to save the woman he loves” as being the plot of the Dante’s Inferno video game, which was also supposed to become a movie a few years ago. Apparently, with enough time, video games can become indistinguishable from classic literature. That’s pretty cool/scary.