Denzel Washington’s 2010 action thriller The Book Of Eli is heading to the small screen, with John Boyega take the lead as a younger Denzel.
Much like Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington has become something of an action hero in the latter stages of his career. While he has previously appeared in films like Ricochet and Crimson Tide, it wasn’t until he played John Creasy in Tony Scott’s brutal 2004 revenge film Man On Fire that we really got to see him off some bad guys in a variety of inventive ways.
Since then of course, he has become synonymous with vigilante justice, dishing out karmic vengeance in three Equalizer films to date. But in 2010, he played a different kind of action hero in The Book Of Eli, a post apocalyptic thriller in which he plays a drifter intent on delivering a sacred book to safety in the West Coast of the United States. In doing so, he encounters multiple obstacles, not least the warlord Carnegie and his various henchmen, whom he dispatches in a series of slick fight scenes. It also sees Washington share the screen with Gary Oldman, so if you haven’t seen it, The Book Of Eli is well worth tracking down.
Directed by The Hughes Brothers and written by Gary Whitta, the film divided critics, but was nevertheless a commercial success, grossing over $150 million on an $80 million budget.
While a sequel was out of the question, according to Deadline it appears a prequel television series has been in the works for some time, and is now at quite an advanced stage. With Whitta on writing duties once again, and The Hughes Brothers on board as executive producers, the plot will be “set 30 years prior to the events in the film, which would put it around the time of the nuclear event or its immediate aftermath”. A short synopsis there, but it gives a flavour of what to expect.
John Boyega will play the younger version of Washington’s character Eli, with further casting to be announced.
There’s no time scale on when we might see the series but, in Hollywood speak, the series is apparently one of the “highest-profile, star-driven, IP-based packages to hit the premium TV marketplace since the end of the Hollywood strikes”, which we imagine means it will be going before the cameras sooner rather than later. We’ll keep you updated as we hear more.
