Maybe they just thought it sounded cool, but it’s difficult not to wonder whether the guys who created the graphic novel Cowboy Ninja Viking weren’t thinking about selling the rights to Hollywood when they came up with the name. After all, just the title alone is enough to get a lot of studio executives wetting themselves with excitment, before they’ve actually read what it’s about.
If that was in the back of AJ Lieberman and illustrator Riley Rossmo’s mind when they came up with it, it’s certainly worked, as Deadline reports that Disney has no acquired the rights to the comic and set Zombieland scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to write the screenplay (they’re also behind the script for the upcoming Deadpool movie).
As you may have guessed, Cowboy Ninja Viking is a bit of a genre mash-up, about a doctor who recruits multiple-personality patients into a counter-intelligence outfit dubbed The Triplets. One of the subjects, known as Triplets, is trained to be an assassin with three different skill sets – Cowboy, Ninja and Viking – with the personalities that come with that. However when the other Triplets go out of control, Cowboy Ninja Viking is the only one who can sort them out.
To be honest, while it’s a great concept and you can see why Disney jumped on it, it’s also the sort of thing that’s going to be difficult to pull off, so it’s wouldn’t be shocking if the whole thing quickly fell in development hell, once the execs come down from their high about the title and realise what it’s going to entail. We’ll have to wait and see.