Following our report back in January that suggested as much, attached-director Dan Trachtenberg has confirmed, via Twitter, that the big screen rights to the acclaimed comic book series Y: The Last Man have fully reverted back to creators Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra and that the planned adaptation is no longer moving forward.
“Not happening,” Trachtenberg responded to a fan asking for an update on the project. “But it’s in trusted hands (the creators).”
Y tells the story of Yorick Brown, a young man who, along with his capuchin monkey, Ampersand, somehow survives a catastrophic event that kills off every living creature with a Y chromosome. Left in a world of only women, Yorick teams with a government operative, 355, to try and uncover the truth about the plague and why he and he alone made it through alive.
Although set against an enormously scaled post-apocalyptic backdrop, the 60-issue series primarily serves as an exploration of modern gender politics and is, at its heart, an intimate coming-of-age drama.
“The script was essentially the first two trades,” Trachtenberg then revealed to /Film of the film that could have been. “Taking inspiration from the original Star Wars – we wanted to tell a complete story…but not the whole story. Hoping that, in success, we could get tell the rest of our serialized adventure.”
So what happens with Y now? The answer could be, “Nothing at all.”
“I’m not sure Brian will ever want to do anything more with it,” says Trachtenberg, “and I’m not sure that he needs to.”
With a rapidly increasing upcoming slate of comic book-inspired fare coming soon to both big and small screens, choosing not to adapt Y at all may not seem to make the most fiscal sense. Then again, Vaughn has a long been a champion of comic books as an art form in and of themselves. Not adapting Y is likely, too, to further cement the work’s already-established reputation as The Catcher in the Rye of sequential art. While that would mean that fans won’t have a film to look forward to, the good news is that the entire story is available right now at your local comic book store.
