Brooke Bunny
Sony Pictures has picked up Robert Rodriguez’s next, a feature adaption of the ’80s animated classic “Fire And Ice”.
The film, says Deadline, is the “Sin City” director’s homage to his friend and legendary animator Frank Frazetta, on whose works Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi based that original film.
The intention is for “Fire and Ice” to be a huge sprawling franchise.
In the original film, a small village is destroyed by a surging glacier domain for the evil Ice Lord, Nekron. Sole survivor is a young warrior who vows vengeance, and when Nekron’s subhuman, apelike creatures kidnap a king’s daughter, the warrior becomes determined to track down and free her.
“I’m a lifelong Frazetta fan who was inspired by his work, like so many people,” Rodriguez said. “It was my dream to work with him, and the first thing I did when I got to Hollywood was call him. I got him to do a From Dusk Till Dawn poster for me, and I got to work with him and know him over the years. When I’d visit him at his museum and see his artwork, I tried to figure what would the ultimate Frazetta movie be. I remembered the movie he did, Fire And Ice, back when I was a kid. I thought, ‘I wish they could have made it look more like the paintings, but I guess they’d have had to paint each frame.’ Now, you could do that. You could make it look like you were in his imagination. He didn’t use models, he didn’t use swipes. He painted purely from his imagination, and the characters and the colors made you feel like you were in a dream, and a fully realized and completely imagined world. It was so visual and arresting.”
As for “Fire and Ice”, Rodriguez says :
“I started developing it independently with Bold Films,” Rodriguez said. “The more we started putting it together, we realized it could be something much bigger and it started attracting A-list talent. I thought, ‘Let’s partner with a studio,’ but which would give it the rocket fuel it deserves? I’d heard Mike De Luca was looking for franchises, and I thought this could fit the bill because of the subject matter and the talent that was interested, people who’d seen the presentation I had and wanted to. Turned out Mike was a big Frazetta fan, and the studio was the perfect place. I’d started out with them with El Mariachi, and I had a long relationship with the studio and it seemed like the perfect rocket fuel for this. We’re actively interviewing to hire A-list writers to do another pass to get this going next year. I’m excited.”
The film will remain loyal to Frazetta’s film’s original aesthetic.
“Sin City reflected Miller’s two-dimensional plane and had an abstract very graphic quality to it, while Frazetta’s is this heightened reality, or rather layers of unreality that create a dream like reality you can get lost in, with an adventure film right out of his imagination. If we get the script in the next couple months, by the end of spring or start of summer, we start preproduction.”
