'New Gods' Movie Taps Comic Writer Tom King To Co-Write Screenplay With Ava DuVernay

It's been a while since we heard anything regarding The New Gods, the Warner Bros. DC film being directed by Ava DuVernay. But now, we have an update: Tom King, a comics writer whose credits include The Vision for Marvel and DC's Batman, will pen the New Gods movie script with DuVernay. The New Gods movie will be based on the comic characters created by legendary writer and artist Jack Kirby.

The Wrap broke the news about Tom King joining Ava DuVernay to co-wrote the New Gods movie script. King is an author, comic book writer, and ex-CIA officer with credits on Mister Miracle, Swamp Thing, Nightwing, The Vision and Batman. DuVernay was announced as the film's director back in March of 2018. Since then, however, there's been very little news about the film.

So what does King's hiring mean? There's a good chance DC and Warner Bros. want to start fast-tracking this project in order to get the jump on the upcoming Marvel movie The Eternals, which features a similar storyline – literal gods interacting with us puny mortals. Jack Kirby created the New Gods in the 1970s, with the characters first appearing in February 1971 in New Gods #1. Here's some backstory on the characters directly from DC:

The New Gods are exactly that—they're new gods. They came into existence after the world of the old gods, the gods of classical mythology, was destroyed during Ragnarok. The world of these known deities was split and became two separate planets, forever linked, but utterly different. One is called New Genesis and the other is Apokolips.

These worlds are referred to as twins, but the reality is that they couldn't be or look more different. New Genesis is a lush green paradise, while Apokolips is a scorched, nightmarish land marked by massive fire pits. Both these worlds exist outside of the DC Multiverse, meaning the Apokolips on Earth Prime is the same one as on Earth-2. So when the forces of Apokolips attacked Earth-2 in the pages of our Earth-2 comic, they were the same forces that are now invading Earth Prime in "Darkseid War." However, since they exist outside the Multiverse, they require a special form of transportation to get here—boom tubes.

I don't know about you, but I really hope "boom tubes" make it into the movie, and that characters say the term "boom tubes" as much as possible. New Gods characters include Highfather, Big Barda, Granny Goodness, and of course, Darkseid – a character that was hinted at in the DCEU, but who never made an appearance. However, Steppenwolf, another New Gods character, turned up in Justice League, where he was presented as the most boring comic book villain in movie history. Maybe he'll get a do-over for the New Gods movie.