Variety reports that Mark Wahlberg has signed for the lead in the big-screen adaptation of Max Payne. The 3rd person shooter game was released by Rockstar Games (makers of Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto Series) back in 2001. The story centered on Max Payne, an embittered cop from Hell's Kitchen who comes home one day to find his wife and baby daughter have been murdered by junkies. Now undercover in the DEA, Max is given up to the mob all the while, uncovering a government conspiracy surrounding a designer drug called Valkyr. The game spawned two sequels and Fox had purchased the screen rights back in 2003.

John Moore has already been slated to direct the Beau Thorne script (Moore is also behind the vampire zombie flick Virulents that Scott told us about a few months ago). Some changes have taken place with the story; they kept the dead family, but it seems like the conspiracy angle has been tossed. Now, the story is about a cop (Wahlberg) with, "little regard for rules as he investigates a series of mysterious murders. He finds himself up against an adversary bent on destroying Max and the streets he protects".

Producer Scott Faye told IGN back in July that, "I think this is a real actor's part because although the story will have action and intrigue, at its core it's a story about a man who loses everything in life that's dear to him" -- so I can only assume that Faye is convinced that Wahlberg is the man for the job -- if nothing else, he does have the sneer down pat. Wahlberg recently replaced Ryan Gosling in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones and will start work on Payne as soon as Bones has been completed. Max Payne is tentatively scheduled to start shooting early next year and head for theaters in 2010.

What would it take to make a war movie extra special? How about zombified vampires? Yep, that's what you'll find in the cinematic adaptation of xxx's* graphic novel Virulents. According to Variety, director John Moore has been tapped by New Regency to turn the Virgin Comics release into a big gooey movie. By my estimation, John Moore has made two stylish and generally entertaining adventure flicks (Behind Enemy Lines and Flight of the Phoenix) and one resoundingly pointless Xerox of a genuine classic (The Omen). Still, two out of three isn't bad.

Here's a plot synopsis from the official Virgin Comics site: "A small platoon of American soldiers in search of their missing comrades comes across Indian commandoes looking for a group of terrorists suspected of hiding a most heinous weapon in the craggy breast of the Hindukush. It's a night of revelation as the Americans discove the fate of their lost brothers, and the Indiams discover the fate of their terrorists. But the terror is not in the form of flesh and blood, or bullets or gunpowder. Terror has a new name."

And that name is ... zombie vampires! Woohoo! So it's like a cross between Black Hawk Down, Dawn of the Dead and Near Dark? (Yeah, in my dreams it is.) Newcomer scribe John Cox has been given adaptation duties, and producer Gotham Chopra seems more than a little psyched about the project: The story is "set in a part of the world that has a long history of myth and mystery, and it's going to rock." So there you have it: It's set in Afghanistan. It's got soldiers and terrorists and zombo-vamps. It's going to rock. I'm officially psyched to see Virulents.

* Neither the Variety article nor the official Virgin site can tell me who wrote / drew the Virulents book. I'd dig a little deeper and find out for sure, but I think it's pretty weird so I choose to let it just hang there for now.