Secret History: Marshal Law The Movie Options

Welcome to my new book And Where Will It All End? The Secret History of Comics, where I take you behind the scenes to show you how your favourite subversive characters were created.

You can read the intro here, it’s available for everyone. Every subsequent part has a free preview and the rest of it is for paying subscribers only, so if you’d like access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release it every week (plus other benefits, check them out here), please consider subscribing: it’s £5 per month or £50 per year and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I’m offering a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it out. You will need to select a subscription plan and provide your payment details to do this.

From time to time, there has been intense interest in Marshal Law the Movie. I’ve lost track of the number of times it has been optioned. Even though one producer, at least, Don Murphy, said it would never be made. Presumably because of its uncompromising tone and subversive political subtext, which is anathema for many in Hollywood who only want the establishment political subtext to prevail.

In the mid 90s, it was optioned by an important but independent film company and I wrote a screenplay for it. Then the option lapsed, and numerous offers have followed all the way through to the present day because Kevin (now his estate) and I own the movie, TV, merchandising and gaming rights to Law – not D.C. Comics. There was so much interest, in fact, I can’t always keep track of the offers, especially as they’re often time-consuming and have led nowhere. Sometime they’re wannabe production companies who are looking for a free option – aka a ‘shopping agreement’ – or want to buy it cheap and then sell it on, but I can usually spot a time waster and I give them short shrift. Other times, it’s art-house directors who love Law and would like to do an interesting, ‘punk’, low-budget, cult movie, but that isn’t what we’re looking for either. We feel it should be a studio production. Sometimes interest is shown by actors who see it as a vehicle for themselves. That’s always worth considering if they’re important enough. After all, Accident Man was similarly and successfully optioned by Scott Adkins. In recent years Joe Manganiello, a star of True Blood who also played Flash Thomson in Spiderman, was very interested in optioning and playing Law, but ultimately that didn’t come together. 

Even a well-known British film company once asked if the film rights were available, so that’s yet another possibility. It certainly found favour with us. A British company would have the merit of understanding the nuances of our humour, although, that said, I’m a big fan of Airplane and the subsequent comedies in that genre and some of the Law stories might easily go down the same humorous road. But the original long story Fear and Loathing usually attracts the most movie interest.

This was the case with the nearest we ever got to movie success: a top Hollywood agency pitched Law to Warner Brothers just before Watchmen came out.