Late last year, we learned that a new take on one of Alan Moore's most celebrated works, V For Vendetta, was in development at HBO, with BAFTA Award-nominated Somewhere Boy writer Pete Jackson attached to pen the series, and DC Studios co-heads James Gunn and Peter Safran on board as executive producers.
We hadn't heard anything since, and Jeff Sneider is now reporting that the project is no longer moving forward.
"I’m now told that HBO has passed on Jackson’s script," Sneider writes in his newsletter. "One source told me that Jackson delivered a period-themed take on the material, while HBO was curious to see what a more modern take on a political anarchist might look like.
According to an HBO insider, just because the network isn’t moving forward with Jackson’s take doesn’t mean that a V for Vendetta series won’t be redeveloped with another writer down the line."
So, we may see a V for Vendetta series at some point, but we wouldn't bank on it.
Moore's 1982 tale is set in a dystopian Britain controlled by the fascist Norsefire party. An anarchist named V, inspired by the infamous revolutionary Guy Fawkes, attempts to take down the government with the help of a young woman named Evey Hammond.
Here's what Moore had to say about the origin of his idea for V during a 2000 interview.
"When we started to do V, the entirety of the original idea was that we would have a dark, romantic, noirish adventurer and then we thought we’d set him in the future and then the details slowly came together and yeah, somewhere out of this we realized we were doing something about the contrast between anarchy and fascism, that there were lots of moral questions being asked and that yes, it was very much centred upon the world of ideas as being in some ways more important than the material world, which is I think a notion which has probably born fruit recently in other areas of my work, where it’s still something that I’m very much involved with, that notion, that ideas are more important, if anything, than the material."
The graphic novel was previously adapted as a 2005 movie starring Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman. It was generally well received and proved to be a moderate box office success (it was a much bigger hit on DVD), but many fans of the far more complex comic series felt it missed the mark.
Back in 2017, Channel 4 planned a series adaptation that never got off the ground. According to Variety, The HBO Max/Epix DC series Pennyworth "was also meant to serve as a prequel to V for Vendetta, though it was canceled after three seasons before that storyline could be fully fleshed out."