It was summer 2011 when we last had a PREACHER update (Shia LaBeouf for Arseface?! Nooooo!), and as much of a fan of Garth Ennis’ seminal comic book as I am personally, I was actually hoping the long silence meant that the project had once more been boxed. Sadly not…

“I’m still attached to PREACHER,” director DJ Caruso told IAmRogue.com in a recent interview, “and we’re wrestling with Sony because I got another movie at Sony called INVERTIGO, which is a big action film we’re trying to get going this summer. So PREACHER got put on the back burner, but we’re still involved with it and hopefully we’ll have some good news on that soon. John August wrote a great script. I think it’s one of those features that has to kind of go through the studio system if it’s going to be made for a certain price. So we’re kind of revisiting a way to approach making the movie in the right way.”

Now it’s not Sony’s choice of director that niggles (DISTURBIA, EAGLE EYE, and I AM NUMBER FOUR were… ok), it’s the fact that the big-screen is a horrible home for the property. Those 66-issues’ worth of story need time to breath! Even in the highly unlikely circumstance that a PREACHER movie opens well and a sequel or trilogy is greenlit, the amount of story that will have to be jettisoned would be tragic. It would also need to be significantly toned down to the point of being unrecognizable (there’d be no place for Jesus de Sade and his gerbils in the movie, no sir). TV is the only medium in which to adapt this properly, or, even better, Netflix. This of course nearly came to pass in 2006, when HBO were looking to develop it as a series, but sadly a change of executives saw the project kicked to the curb once more.

If it can’t be made into a series, we hope someone sees sense and just cans it completely. We’ll always have the comic book.

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