Not a week goes by that we don’t read a post or private message: “Any news on the Elfquest movie?” Okay, it’s been a little while, but that’s why you can scroll down through past entries, to catch up on what you might have missed. It was almost two years ago (January 20, 2012) that Warner Bros., after having had Elfquest under option and consideration for four years, said “no.” And it was about a month prior to that (December 11, 2011) that Wendy posted on Facebook:
“As you know, Richard and I are waiting to hear if Warner Bros.,
We’ve heard two pieces of good news recently. One, Warner Bros. has renewed their option in the Elfquest property. This means that they’re still committed to further development to whip this four-tribe howling saga into a movie. Two, they’ve also signed on a producer to the project – again, another sign of WB’s ongoing interest and desire to, as the phrase goes, “get ‘er done.” The producer is Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who’s got a great reputation in Hollywood as someone who makes movies happen.
Click here (and scroll to the bottom of the page) for a treat for everyone who’s curious about what the storyboard for an Elfquest movie might look like. This is Act One of the imagined film as it was pitched to the Edward Pressman Film company back in 1994. Wendy spent months breaking down the elements of the story as it was presented in the graphic novels, and rearranging them in a way that would make sense for the dynamics of a movie.
Email from director/screenwriter Rawson Thurber, which contains but a single word: “Finished.”
Now that the draft of the screenplay is in, comes the hard work of trimming approximately 1/3 of it. Some big guns – and big pens – may be called in.
Nearly a year after it happened, I’m finally able to post the full video of the Elfquest panel that ran at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con International Expo. The entire 49-minute video is now on YouTube. Since they don’t allow anything longer than 10 minutes, it’s been split into five segments. Each is titled “Elfquest movie panel part 1 (through 5).” It’s a lot of fun and gives you the entire show, including the Elfquest slide presentation leading up to the question-and-answer segment.
No news of substance since the last entry. Yes, we have had several back and forth messages with Rawson Thurber, the director and screenwriter on the project. He is diligently working on the first draft of the screenplay; when he finishes, it will go to the higher-ups at Warner Bros. for their take on it. We’re hoping they will like it enough to then green-light the project. That’s when it will (keep fingers crossed) go from “development hell” into pre-production. And then we’ll all know a lot more.
This is the latest major news that we had. We received word early in the morning that Warner Brothers finalized a deal to license the property to develop and produce an Elfquest movie. The first (of many) industry announcement appeared in Hollywood Reporter. You can read the text here, although the actual page has been archived by HR. Other reports appeared within hours; a few of them are here and here and here and here. If you Google the words “Elfquest” and “movie” together, you’ll get a long list of other announcements from that time.
This will be short. Once you’ve finished, you can click here to go back to the main movie page, and then browse the history of the many paths the EQ movie project has taken.
Almost from Elfquest’s beginning as a comic book/graphic novel, people were interested in turning it into an animated film. Studios large and small optioned the story, to try to develop it into a suitable screenplay (or television series). One thing or another would get in the way – and as often as not, it was our strong desire to see the movie done “right” (whatever we thought that was at the time).
For years, we’ve posted announcements, news, updates and editorials about the ever-evolving state of the Elfquest movie hither and yon across the Elfquest web site: on the Scroll of Colors forum, in the news section, in the editorials section. And for an uncomfortably long time, I’ve been aware that the links and cross-links and cross-cross-links have grown to resemble a mess of strangleweed, the likes of which even Winnowill couldn’t imagine!
At long last, I’m pulling all the chapters into one place.
Elfquest was made for animation. This is literally as well as aesthetically true. Two people may be said to be “made for each other” if they discover themselves to be compatible, but that discovery is made long after their birth. Elfquest was born to be animated.
Elfquest was a gleam in its creators’ eyes well before its first appearance as a comic book in early 1978. Wendy Pini, the scripter and artist of the series, had already been a professional fantasy artist for a decade; I was writing professionally for the planetarium field; and we both were avid fans of comics and film.
Most of what you’ve read until now was written some years back, and until early 1993 there was not much happening with Elfquest and animation. Wendy and I had, for the moment, had enough. We’d decided to pull the wagons in a circle, get back to the business of telling comic book stories, and let the cosmos roll around to moviemaking when it felt it was good and ready.
It must have felt good and ready that particular winter/spring, for we got the news that a major producer was interested in acquiring the rights to develop Elfquest as an animated film.
Not a week goes by that we don’t read a post or private message: “Any news on the Elfquest movie?” Okay, it’s been a little while, but that’s why you can scroll down through past entries, to catch up on what you might have missed. It was almost two years ago (January 20, 2012) that Warner Bros., after having had Elfquest under option and consideration for four years, said “no.” And it was about a month prior to that (December 11, 2011) that Wendy posted on Facebook:
“As you know, Richard and I are waiting to hear if Warner Bros.,