Producer Joel Silver must love the DC Comics character Sgt. Rock, as he’s been constantly trying to bring him to the big screen for nearly 20 years. While there’s been endless directors, writers and actors involved in trying to adapt the character, the project has never moved past the early scripting stage (both Arnie and Bruce Willis have been attached to star at different points, while director Guy Ritchie was involved as recently as 2007).
However it now looks like the project has some forward momentum again, with THR reporting that Constatine and I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is attached to helm the movie, with Chad St. John the latest person hired to tackle the script.
Sgt. Rock himself has been around since 1959, leading the World War II infantry unit, Easy Company. While his comic was cancelled in 1988, he’s since appeared in various other DC properties, such as being part of Lex Luthor’s administration, and crossing paths with Batman. However in his classic form, he was resolutely a WWII man, with some versions of his story saying that actually he was killed by the very last bullet fired during the war.
However the new plan for the movie version is to take him out of the Second World War completely and instead transplant him into the future. While Joel Silver had previously always wanted the film to be set during WWII, with period war movies out of vogue he’s had huge difficulty securing the massive budget needed, which is why it’s taken decades to get it to the screen. He now hopes to get around the problem by giving Sgt. Rock a more more futuristic setting. That may not please purists, but in the current Hollywood climate, it’s probably the only way to finally get the movie made.
That said, if after another two decades Silver is still having new ideas about he’s going to get Sgt. Rock into the screen, we wouldn’t be shocked.