Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi Aren’t ‘Sleeping’ On The Job

Back in August we let you know that Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi were interested in making a film version of the Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips comic book, Sleeper. Then in October it was announced that Brad Ingelsby had been hired to pen the script. However, news on the project died down as Cruise attached himself to multiple projects and Raimi became involved in pre-production on Spider-Man 4.

Co-creator Ed Brubaker spoke to MTV recently and told them that Ingelsby was no longer the writer of the film but that Cruise and Raimi are still involved in the project.

Brubaker said:

“I talked to one of the producers a couple of weeks ago, and they have a new screenwriter that they hired. I don’t think they could all get on the same page. You know Hollywood, though, they usually go through a million screenwriters on one project.”

The plot of the film is as follows:

” An operative whose fusion with an alien artifact makes him impervious to pain and allows him to pass it on to others through skin contact. He is placed undercover in a villainous organization by an intelligence agency and falls for a member of the group, named Miss Misery.”

Brubaker also believes that the success of the latest Star Trek film also had an impact on the film’s new approach:

“If you remember in Sleeper, there’s a ’suitcase black hole’ in the story. That was going to be part of the master plan of the bad guy in the Sleeper movie, and then Star Trek came out and it had this miniature black hole, and they’re like, ‘Now we can’t use a suitcase black hole,’ and it went back for a rewrite. I don’t understand why movies are like that. That’s like saying you can’t use World War II because Saving Private Ryan did it already.”

With no script, plot troubles and the fact that Tom Cruise and Sam Raimi are seemingly going to be busy for the next few years, I can’t imagine that Sleeper will be seeing the inside of a cinema soon.

Even Brubaker is shocked at the attention the project is receiving from Hollywood, because the original comic book didn’t sell that well:

“It was one of my lowest-selling books, so you’d think that every copy that sold had ended up in Hollywood somewhere.”

Well, at least one ended up in Tom Cruise’s hand.

More on Sleeper when and if it ever happens.

Source: MTV