Babylon 5 creator and Spider-Man scribe J. Michael Straczynski pulled back the curtain on several upcoming projects in a post to his message board a few weeks back. Here’s one of the more interesting tidbits:
“The screenplay for the film I’m writing for Universal will be turned in mid-January. Akiva Goldsman is among the producers on this project, a big budget historical movie based on the life of King David.”
Now, I’d thought the 1985 version starring Richard Gere (left) had pretty much killed the big-screen biblical epic as a genre, but then somebody reminded me of the success of The Passion of the Christ and, on a somewhat smaller scale, The Nativity Story, so maybe the time is finally right to revisit the Books of Samuel and Kings. (Actually, there was a TV miniseries that retold this story in the ’90s, starring Nathaniel Parker as David; aren’t you sorry you missed Leonard Nimoy’s performance as the prophet Samuel?) As a screenwriter himself, Goldsman is no stranger to adaptation—or, for that matter, to stories involving the House of David: he penned the high-grossing film version of Dan Brown‘s Da Vinci Code and is already at work on Angels and Demons.