Jake Gyllenhaal No Longer Starring in Film Adaptation of Rob Liefeld's PROPHET
It’s been about four years since it was announced that Rob Liefeld's Prophet was being adapted into a feature film. Jake Gyllenhall was attached to star in and executive produce the movie, but the actor has exited the project.
The news comes from Liefeld himself on social media saying, "Folks ask me about the Prophet film, and while the movie is still moving forward, I can confirm it is no longer with Jake Gyllenhaal's involvement. Wishing him all the best with Roadhouse and his future projects."
Marc Guggenheim was also attached to the project at one point early on to write the script, and he also eventually left the project. It seems like Extraction filmmaker Sam Hargrave is still attached to direct it, though.
Gyllenhaal was going to play John Prophet, a man “conscripted by Germans near the end of World War II and subjected to scientific experiments that gave him superhuman strength.”
In the film, “John Prophet volunteers for a German experiment near the end of World War II in order to feed his family. After a bombing buries him alive and traps him underground for 20 years, he reawakens in 1965, where things are not great for Prophet. The world has moved on without him, his daughter resents him, and KGB agents are after him to create super-soldiers from his blood.”
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the character John Prophet and his story:
John Prophet, a poor and homeless man living in the World War II era, volunteered to participate in the medical experiments of Dr. Horatio Wells, a time-traveling scientist from the future who used DNA-enhancing methods to transform Prophet into a supersoldier. Prophet was engineered to serve the evil Phillip Omen and programmed with murderous instincts. Wells had a change of heart though and changed Prophet's programming from evil to a strong belief in God. Wells planned for Prophet to be placed into stasis for many years and then re-emerge in the future to help Wells's people fight the evil Disciples. Eventually found by Youngblood, Prophet awakens disoriented, in a world he does not recognize, and he mistakes Youngblood for the Disciples and attacks.
It was later discovered that Prophet was not always in stasis after World War II, and had been used as "a mindless weapon of war" in Vietnam. Stephen Platt, Prophet artist from 1994 to 1996, explained that the character "feel[s] responsible for the things that people forced him to do, even though he can't remember them. He's always thought of himself as a good person, and now he's discovering that the things he did were hideous by all standards of human decency. He's going to [...] take a spiritual journey to discover who he really is."
Despite his enhanced DNA and ability to communicate in all languages, Prophet was described as "very childlike" by Platt. "He doesn't know the social workings of the world that most of us take for granted: he can't hail a cab, and he eats ice cream too fast and gets a headache.”
Now the Gyllenhaal is no longer attached to the project, is there another actor you’d like to see take on the role?