Mark Millar's 'Reborn' Movie, Produced By Sandra Bullock, Finds A Writer

In 2017, Netflix acquired famed comic book creator Mark Millar's Millarworld company to mine it for film and TV projects. Last year, the streaming service announced it would produce an original film version of Millar's sci-fi fantasy comic Reborn, with Chris McKay (The LEGO Batman Movie) directing and Oscar winner Sandra Bullock producing.

Now, more than a year later, the project has finally found its writer: up-and-coming scribe Bek Smith, who has previously worked at Marvel Studios.

THR broke the news that the Reborn movie writer will be Bek Smith, who's previously written on the bonkers CBS series Zoo and is currently working on one of Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse spin-offs.Reborn, written by Millar and featuring art by Greg Capullo, was first published back in 2016 under the Image Comics banner. The story follows Bonnie Black, an eighty-year-old woman who dies in a hospital in Manhattan and wakes up reborn in the prime of her life in a place called Adstyria, "a magical land of monsters and dragons where good and evil are waging an eternal war. There, she finds old friends and loved ones waiting, except the husband who died before her." The "reborn" version of Bonnie arms herself with a sword, teams up with her late father and her childhood dog, and heads off through the war-torn landscape of Adstyria to try to find her husband. Sounds like a killer concept, and with The Old Guard doing great numbers for Netflix (assuming you take them at their word, anyway), this is another female-centered comic book project that could theoretically turn into a franchise for the streaming service.

While Smith doesn't have any feature film writing credits yet, she's also hard at work on a long-brewing movie adaptation of the DC/Vertigo comic 100 Bullets over at New Line, and she's also working on a project called World War Something that Noah Hawley is producing for Hulu.

Chris McKay directed more than 40 episodes of Robot Chicken and nine episodes of the animated series Titan Maximum before stepping into Warner Bros. fold and directing The LEGO Batman Movie. He's also directing The LEGO Batman Movie 2, which is currently slated for release in 2022, and he's in post-production on The Tomorrow War, a Chris Pratt sci-fi thriller for Paramount. As far as we know, he's still attached to direct a live-action Nightwing movie for WB and he's rumored to be directing a Jonny Quest film for that same studio.