“They approached me last year and said, ‘We want to do a feature film of this character. Will you write it for us?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely,’ because A, I like jazz, B, I like the supernatural, and there’s a really cool mix between those two, not just in terms of the usual New Orleans, Voodoo environment, but what is music but incantation of sorts?
“We had talked about the difference between the ‘Shadowman’ movie and the ‘Shadowman’ comic, and the good thing is that the folks involved understand that there’s a difference between a movie and a comic book. There were times when they said, ‘We’re doing this in the book, does it work for you in the movie?’ Some things did work and we’re going to carry them over, and some things did not and I said, ‘We have to leave that out.’
“I think in the longterm Valiant would like to see this as a consistent, contigous universe for them. But, again, you have to go through these things incrementally. You have to create the character first, make sure the character works. Once you’ve done that then you can go on to create the universe. No one is going to care about the universe if they don’t care about the character first…..Valiant is smart enough to know we need to be step by step about this sort of thing.”
Straczynski confirmed that the first draft of the script will be turned in by the end of spring and they’re hoping to start production in the first part of next year for a fall 2014 release date. He also confirmed there likely won’t be any other Valiant Comics cameos in the Shadowman film, but that down the road it’s a possibility.
