Don Pendelton’s The Executioner book series is taking another run at the big-screen.
Sony Pictures has picked up a testosterone-fueled creative package that sees Lethal Weapon and The Nice Guys‘ Shane Black reteam with veteran action producer Joel Silver to adapt the action-adventure paperback novels. The package pick-up happened as Sony secured the complicated screen rights to the Executioner books, putting them in one house for the first time in decades.
Black will write, with an eye to direct, the script with frequent collaborators Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry. Silver will produce alongside Angry Films’ Don Murphy and Susan Montford, who have spent the last several years steering the complicated rights of Pendleton’s creation.
Executioner was a pulpy book series that told the muscular and bullet-filled adventures of Mark Bolan, a sniper turned one man army fighting against the Mafia, the KGB, terrorists and cyber-criminals, or whoever were the bad guys of his latest book’s era.
Initially the books were written by Pendleton but later ghost writers were hired as Pendleton licensed out the books, which at their height were being churned out upwards of two a month and in the end numbered 464 books. The series ran from 1969 to 2020 (Pendleton died in 1995), selling hundreds of millions copies worldwide, spawned spin-off book lines, a magazine and comics.
Hollywood had long tried to adapt Bolan’s adventures. William Freidkin made an attempt that would have seen Sylvester Stallone play Bolan. Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen were also involved in certain iterations.
Screenwriter Shane Salerno tried to set up an adaptation at Warner Bros. in 2014 with Bradley Cooper attached to star but that was destined to fail from the outset. According to several sources, he only had part of the rights in his hands as Sony has had domestic screen rights to the books for decades.
But this new deal sees all the rights line up under Sony’s umbrella, hopefully paving a clear runway.
The Executioner deal is a full circle moment for Silver, who tried to get a movie off the ground in the early 1990s. And Black is a dime store paperback and pulp fiction aficionado, with the Bolan stories among his favorites.
The reunion of Black and Silver is a tantalizing one. As writer and producer, the pair respectively count classic and well-remembered action movies Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and The Nice Guys among their collaborations. (The duo also worked together on Black’s Amazon movie Play Dirty before the producer was let go over claims of verbal abuse.)
Bagarozzi and Mondy, meanwhile, are also frequent collaborators of Black’s. Bagarozzi co-wrote Nice Guys with Black and co-wrote Dirty Money with both Black and Mondry. Mondry and Bagarozzi also co-wrote the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring reboot of Road House, which Silver producer.
Murphy, one of the producers of the long-running Transformers franchise, and Montford are producers behind the upcoming edgy horror movie Faces of Death, which IFC/Shudder open April 10. Their Angry Films banner is also developing a live-action feature adaptation of horror video game Poppy Playtime and classic pulp hero Buck Rogers, both with Legendary.
Pendleton’s estate is repped by Joel Gotler at Intellectual Property Group, which also reps authors such as Jeffrey Archer, James Ellroy, and Micheal Connelly.
Black is repped by WME, Greenlit Management and Goodman Genow. Bagarozzi and Mondry are also repped by WME, Greenlit Management and Goodman Genow.