Variety reports that Virgin Comics will partner with Jonathan Mostow for a feature film version of his just-published comic, The Megas. Based off an idea from Mostow about a group of elites, it is part of Virgin's Directors Cut line of comics. Mostow is perhaps best known as the director of Terminator 3, but he is in good company at Virgin. Other directors who have signed up include John Woo, Guy Ritchie, Ed Burns, and Terry Gilliam.

The story "revolves around Detective Jack Madison and his race-against-the-clock investigation to uncover secrets behind the mysterious sex-fueled suicide of a Prince in The Megas royal family. Meanwhile, the King is on his deathbed at The White Palace (yes, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!), and society is bracing for the inevitable chaos that will surely ensue once he dies." Basically, it seems to be about a corrupted ruling class and the everyman who is forced to bring them down.

There is no word yet on whether Mostow will be involved with writing the script, or directing it for that matter. Mostow already has a remake of The Swiss Family Robinson, and the sci-fi thriller The Surrogates, with Bruce Willis, lined up for 2009. If Virgin wants to get this production going any time soon, they might have to start looking for someone else to take over. The original model for the Director's Cut series was to create comics that were tailor-made for film adaptations, so I would assume that we are going to start to see a lot of Virgin comic book movies in the near future.

Virgin Comics is relatively new to the comic book game. The brainchild of Richard Branson, Deepak Chopra and filmmaker Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), they have a unique vision of bringing comic books with Asian myths and mystical folklore to a growing Indian youth market -- and with the typical Branson flair for business, these comics are custom made with adaptations into other mediums (film, TV, etc.) in mind. The Director's Cut series is one of Virgin's new ideas to get movie directors to create comic books; one of their first will be the John Woo series 7 Brothers, and now Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) is next on board.

There was an announcement on comic book writer Andy Diggle's blog that he will be writing Ritchie's 10-part series The Gamekeeper for Virgin. Diggle is based in the UK and has written for Batman Confidential and Green Arrow. The series, conceived by Ritchie, is about a nature-loving killer. Sounds fun, I wonder if it will be chock full of Kabballah and Cockney thugs? There aren't many publishing details yet, but considering that Ritchie will not be writing or storyboarding the illustrations, you have to wonder why they even bothered calling it a Guy Ritchie comic in the first place. I guess they'll give him a call when they do the movie version.

[via Film Ick]

Related Ritchie:

Guy Ritchie's Career Not Dead Yet

I love this Zap2It headline: "Apatow Hopes Rogen Can Take Advantage of 'Virgin.'" I mean, who hasn't wanted to take advantage of a virgin? Anyway, the article refers, of course, to Judd Apatow, who worked on the wonderful but unfortunately short-lived series Freaks and Geeks, and director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which he co-produced with Seth Rogen, who you may recognize from his roles on Freaks and Undeclared, also an Apatow creation. Rogen, a high school drop out, also worked as a writer on Undeclared. I guess what we can all learn from this is that if you want to be a screenwriter, you need to drop out of high school, or become friends with Judd Apatow.