Hulu is Bringing Marvel's RUNAWAYS To The Small Screen
Marvel has been trying to adapt Runaways into a movie for a very long time, with Joss Whedon once looking at directing it pre-Avengers, Drew Pearce writing the screenplay, and the studio gearing up for a shoot in 2011. But they ended up pressing pause in order to better develop The Avengers and Iron Man 3, and the project has basically been idle since then. Now Marvel has announced that the adaptation will happen after all, not as a movie, but as a TV show for Hulu. Gossip Girl/The O.C. showrunners/writers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage will perform those same duties for this series.
"We've known the Runaways' story would make great television," said Jeph Loeb, Executive Producer and Head of Marvel Television, "and being lucky enough to have Josh and Stephanie--who have time and again created shows that speak so genuinely to this exact audience--write and produce the series is nothing short of remarkable."
Marvel's Runaways was created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, and centers on a group of kids who discover that their parents are supervillains that are part of a group called The Pride, so the kids band together and use their own powers and tech to fight against them. We don't know which lineup of characters will appear in the show, but Birth.Movies.Death has a good breakdown of the main players in the initial comics series:
Niko - a witch who can use dark magic.
Karolina - an openly gay extraterrestrial, her parents are Hollywood stars when they're not being secret supervillains.
Molly - the youngest of the group, she's an 11 year old with super strength and invulnerability.
Chase - the bro of the group, he uses his mad scientist parents' flame gloves, the Fistigons.
Alex - the child of mob bosses, he has a heightened intellect.
Gertrude - her mom and dad are time travelers, and she has a telepathic connection with a velociraptor named Old Lace who is her best bud.
There are other members who join later, but one later member who is introduced in the first issue is Victor Mancha, a cyborg created by Ultron.
I haven't read any of these comics, but this sounds like a truly awesome story. With Schwartz and Savage running the show, it seems obvious that they'll be going after a millennial audience, but will older audiences dig it as well? We'll have to wait and see, but we'll keep you posted about more details when we hear about them.