The Unpublished Grant Morrison - Movies, TV, Games

THE SMILE OF THE ABSENT CAT (1990)

A radio play based upon the life of Louis Wain, an Edwardian painter whose portraits of cats became ever more bizarre as he succumbed to schizophrenia and was locked up in Bedlam. The title came from Alice In Wonderland's Cheshire Cat, via Einstein’s commentary on quantum physics' Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment.  Possibly unfinished, it was never produced.

A comic book version of Morrison's take on Wain's life, with art by Cerebus-alumnus Gerhard, has been running sporadically in the Morrison-edited Heavy Metal Magazine since 2016

DAN DARE (1992)

Treatment for aborted Ridley Scott project, based  in part on Morrison and Rian Hughes' 1990 serial DARE: The Controversial Memoir of Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.  Hughes also worked on the movie project in a design capacity.

Its possible that DARE may also be an influence on the currently in-production Dan Dare movie, as star Sam Worthington name checked Morrison's 'reboot' in a recent interview, though its more likely he was confusing Grant and Garth Ennis, writer of the latest Dan Dare comic book.

Update: Turns out Worthington wasn't confusing the two and Morrison was actually heavily involved in the early stages of the new movie.  Whether the film will actually make it into production any time soon is another matter entirely...

WARCOP (1993)

"Todd McFarlane called me up one day," says Morrison. "Apparently Madonna had called him up and said, 'Todd, would you do a movie for me?' But he didn't want to do it. He told me, 'I don't care, I got a better looking wife than Madonna. You want to have a go at this?'"

Morrison threw together a straightforward action movie pitch for her, a cross between Judge Dredd and Demolition Man about a cop who travels back in time to catch a suspect. "It was just very much a '90s action movie about a kickass girl," he said. "It wasn't particularly weighty or worthy or anything. It was just a dumb action movie like True Lies and those kinds of things.".  The ouline bears a surface similarity to 1994's Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Timecop, created by Dark Horse head honcho Mike Richardson.

Later announced as a forthcoming comic book from Vertigo, Morrison confirmed in an interview that the only thing the book and the movie pitch shared in common was the name. 

FUTURE SHOCK (1995)

Pilot script for a proposed Channel 4 sci-fi anthology show. From collaborator and noted sci-fi author Jeff Noon -

"[Producer/director] Kirk Ewing asked me to be involved.  He showed me some work Grant Morrison had done for it, and I did some work on the title sequence, I think, just adding to Grant's work on that.  I met with Grant a couple of times.  I also started work on an episode of my own.  I can't remember the title of that but it concerned itself with an ecological disaster that delayed, for many years, the onset of puberty in the population, and the psychological and social problems rising from that.  But I only did a few rough pages.

"That's it.  Nothing happened with the project as far as I'm aware."

The pilot was never filmed, and Noon no longer has a copy of the script,

"I met with Kirk at an SF convention in Scotland (probably in Edinburgh), and left the pilot script on a chair in the convention centre.  When we went back to look for it, of course it had vanished.  So there's at least one copy out there, with a happy enough owner!"

In the unlikely event that anyone knows where it is, please get in touch!  Many thanks to Jeff Noon for the additional info.

THE INVISIBLES (1995)

Optioned by BBC Scotland, Morrison produced two scripts for what was intended to be a six part TV series before development stalled.  The TV take on the series was much more grounded in reality than its comic book counterpart, though this still presented problems for the stuffy old Beeb, who reportedly told Morrison "no-one understands telepathy."  The death knell for the proposed show probably sounded in 1998 when BBC Scotland commissioned Invasion: Earth, a six part sci-fi miniseries from future Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio.

Morrison's scripts for episodes one and two of the BBC adaptation can be read on the old grantmorrison.com website.

The series moved briefly to the UK's Channel Four before undergoing sporadic development work as a movie under the auspices of DisInformation founder Richard Metzger in the early 00's.  The obvious parallels between the series and the Matrix movies, and the adverse public and critical reaction to the final film in the Matrix trilogy, seem to have significantly hampered the prospects of the Invisibles movie making it into production.

In recent years Morrison has mentioned in interviews that he's working on a new approach to adapting the Invisibles for the big screen, though bearing in mind the Matrix plaigarism debacle, he was understandably reticent when it comes to details.

In November 2018 it was announced that Morrison was developing a new Invisibles TV show at Universal Cable Productions, the studio behind Morrison's SyFy TV show Happy! and a Morrison-penned mini-series based on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World scheduled to air sometime in 2020.

LAWNMOWER MAN 2 & LAWNMOWER MAN 3: LAWNMOWER LAND (1995)

Treatments commissioned by the producers of the original Stephen King-inspired virtual reality thriller, who requested that the series be taken in a more X-Men-esque super-hero direction.  Morrison wrote the treatments whilst still in the grip of his abduction experience in Kathmandu the previous year.  

 The sequels concerned themselves with a group of young people who come to realise they're living in a virtual reality simulation of the real world, controlled by extra-dimensional insect creatures.  The insects manifest themselves through the executives of a multinational media corporation.  When the heroes awake from their enforced slumber they find themselves strapped to beds in a vast filthy hospital on a post-apocalyptic Earth.  Realising that they've lived their lives inside a computer game, the youngsters start to develop powers and form a super-team.  The third installment sees them searching for a secret outlaw data-city called the Infranet.

 Obviously, there are many parallels between this outline and much of Morrison's later work, specifically The Invisibles and Hexus, the Living Corporation from 2001's Marvel Boy.  The story is also eerily prescient of the Matrix films, though in fairness, as Morrison has acknowledged, much of what went into The Invisibles was common cultural currency of the time.  Who knows, maybe Gnostic sci-fi millenarianism might have flowered a few years earlier if Morrison's Lawnmower Man 2 had made it into production.

 A sequel to The Lawnmower Man, entitled Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, was released in 1996 though Morrison had no involvement in it.

BATMAN: YEAR ZERO (2000)

With director Joel Schumacher leaving the Bat-franchise after the... qualified success of 1997's Batman Forever (it likely made a healthy profit for the studio but cost more and grossed less than previous films in the series), Warner Brothers abandoned work on Schumacher's planned Batman Triumphant and put out the call for writers to pitch a new direction for the lucrative Bat-franchise.   Morrison submitted a pitch via his agent at CAA.

His pitch "had a young Batman traveling around the world, slowly assembling the familiar components of his outfit and disguise in the year before returning to Gotham."

"Batman: Year Zero was only a pitch, not a full screenplay.  People liked it but I was completely unknown in Hollywood and unlikely, under any circumstances, to be chosen as the writer of a major studio picture."

Pre-empting his own later run on the Batman title, Morrison's pitch - inspired by the 1970's Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams Batman run -  featured Man Bat and Ra's Al Ghul as the main antagonists. 

Though the pitch wasn't successful, the executives in charge of the Batman franchise at Warner obviously agreed that returning to the story of "Who Batman Is and How He Came to Be" was a winning approach - in 2003 Warner announced that work was underway simultaneously on both a big-screen adaptation of Miller/Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One (though this was eventually cancelled) and on Memento director Christopher Nolan's own take on the origin of the Caped Crusader, Batman Begins.

SUPERBIA (2000)

Unsold 'real-world superheroes' script written by Morrison, with a story by Morrison and Mark Millar.  Discussing it in an interview, Morrison compared the tone of Superbia's first act to M. Night Shyamalan's Bruce Willis vehicle Unbreakable, released in 2000.

Morrison also used 'Superbia' as the name for the Ultramarines' floating city HQ in his JLA run.

SLEEPLESS KNIGHTS (2002)

Pitched to Dreamworks SKG's Michael De Luca and producer Don Murphy's Angry Films as a "timeless techno-Hallowe'en fairy tale", Dreamworks ultimately bought and commissioned a screenplay for this Spielbergian monster movie for all the family.  Intended as a Goonies-esque movie that would play on TV every Halloween for years to come, Sleepless Knights focused on a group of four kids led by 'Alex Bradbury' (named for sci-fi author Ray Bradbury) saving a world stuck in a perpetual Halloween caused by a time-travel experiment gone awry.  With ghosts and goblins on the loose, the kids must seek the assistance of a team of mysterious homeless folk who make up an "elite ghostbusting squadron called the Sleepless Knights." 

Morrison wrote two drafts of the script in 2002-2003, and in 2004 scripting duties for subsequent drafts were handed to Carl Ellsworth, the writer of Wes Craven's Red Eye and the 2012 remake of Red Dawn.  Guillermo Del Toro was long attached to direct but put it on the back burner numerous times, first to complete Hellboy 2, then Pan's Labyrinth.  It's not 100% clear but it may have been repurposed from live-action to an animated feature at at some point after Ellsworth was brought on board. 

Dreamworks ceased development and put the movie into turnaround late in 2008.  Del Toro left the project at around the same time.

CITIZEN DEATH (2003) 

Video game concept, originally entitled New Bedlam: Citizen Death, a collaboration with Morrison's friend Emilio Machado.  Inspired by hanging out with the designers of the Grand Theft Auto games, Morrison's Citizen Death drew from his previous, not altogether positive, experience writing video game scripts for Battlestar Galactica and Predator: Concrete Jungle.  

"I started thinking it would be a lot more fun if they created a city that was part Edinburgh, part New York, where you had something really weird and a lot more dreamlike — which to me would have been much more interesting, to go to those cities you have in your dreams which are a bit more like Gotham City or something, rather than just re-create New York." 

He described Citizen Death as "my own attempt to do my own dream version of what one of these things should be like." 

With the industry contacts he'd gained from Predator, Morrison shopped it around. "I wrote this huge thing breaking down the whole game into segments and levels. The idea was to create a city that was really immersive. You could go into places and really unusual things might happen if you go into certain stores. You go into one place and you can learn voodoo from the proprietor of the store, and then have to go on missions involving that. The vehicles you could actually get were more interesting, like UFOs, flying saucers and boots that would allow you to bounce around over skyscrapers. For me it was just to stretch all the boundaries of what they do in these games, to make it more like a comic and more fantastical." 

Unfortunately, Morrison's concepts were seen as too far out-there and the game was never sold.  Morrison has mentioned in recent years that he is considering adapting his Citizen Death concept into a comic-book.  It's possible that some of the ideas from Citizen Death - the dream-like Scottish setting for instance - made their way into Grant's 2014 Image series Nameless.

INDIANA JONES 4 (2004?)

Chris Burnham mentioned in a 2015 interview with the War Rocket Ajax podcast that his and Morrison's Nameless series for image was in part inspired by a rejected idea Morrison had submitted for consideration (to Spielberg via his contacts at Dreamworks?) for Indiana Jones.  Presumably this would be sometime between Frank Darabont's Indiana Jones and the City of the Lost Gods was rejected by George Lucas at the beginning of 2004, and before Jeff Nathanson was commissioned to write his script - The Atomic Ants - in August of the same year.  Nathanson's script would go on to provide the framework for David Koepp's final script for Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, eventually released in 2008 after many years of development.  

Ideas from Morrison's Indiana Jones pitch may be incorporated into a second series of Nameless, should Burnham and Morrison decide they want to do one.

WE3 (2005)

Described as "The best unproduced script I've ever read" by respected movie website filmick.com, the first draft was completed in 2005 for New Line. Don Murphy and Susan Montford's Angry Films are producing, with Kung-Fu Panda's John Stevenson and the director of the thoroughly entertaining Incredible Hulk Louis Leterrier attached to co-direct.  The film is envisioned as a combination of live action with CG/puppet animals.  Currently in turnaround and seeking a studio.  Essentially this means New Line believe they've spent too much money on developing it to just kill it outright and are actively looking for another studio to buy the rights and the scripts/contracts/design work etc. for a percentage return on their investment.

Morrison has described the film as the 'new ET' and has dialled the ultra-violence of the original comic books down accordingly.

Unlike all of his other unseen movie projects, Morrison's completed script for We3 is kicking around out there on the internet if you look hard enough...

THE KULT (2006)

Treatment for producer Don Murphy's Angry Films.  Envisioned as a black and white biker exploitation movie, The Kult is based in part on Morrison and Millar's original pitch for their Skrull Kill Krew series for Marvel from way back in 1995, significantly toned-down by Marvel before publication.  The Skrulls themselves had to be removed from the project as they are wrapped up in the Fantastic Four movie license.  Also removed in the wake of Columbine was the school-shooting opening scene.  The project has also been shopped around as a TV series, and is most likely the project Morrison mentioned he was developing for the Fox Network.

WORLD WAR Z (2006)

Film pitch for Brad Pitt's Plan B films based on Max (son of Mel) Brooks' unlikely best-seller, presumably not picked up.  Fellow comic book scribe J. Michael Straczynski wrote a script for the film in 2008 which Aint It Cool News called 'Best Picture worthy', though when the film was eventually released in 2013 after a long and troubled gestation, JMS only got a story credit - the final script was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof.  

SHERLOCK HOLMES (2006)

Film pitch for Warner Brothers; presumably rejected.  Clearly looking for some sort of comic book angle for their Holmes reboot, Lionel Wigram, the executive at Warner who green-lit the movie, quit his corporate role and hired John Watkiss to draw a 'graphic novel' pitch they could deliver back to the studio.  It was picked up and eventually released in 2009 starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. 

TEEN TITANS (2007)

Film pitch for Akiva Goldsman's Weed Road and Warner Brothers, based on the DC comic; presumably rejected.  Mark Verheiden ended up attached to script this, "in the style of The Dark Knight and Superman Returns".  Sounds awful.

Though originally slated for release as a movie in 2012, Goldsman's Teen Titans first morphed into a rejected TV pilot for the TNT network and eventually into the enjoyably ludicrous grimdark 2018 Titans show for the DC Universe streaming service, moving to HBO Max when DC Universe was shuttered.  The show ran for 4 seasons from 2018 to 2023.  Morrison made a cameo appearance as himself in fourth season episode 'Dude, Where's My Gar?'.

AREA 51 (2007)

An adaptation of Midway's 2005 video game, a first-person shooter set inside the eponymous US Air Force base and featuring the vocal talents of David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson.  Paramount Pictures was to have financed the movie, in partnership with CP Productions  Taking Andrzej Bartkowiak's 2005 Doom movie as anti-inspiration, Morison completed a first draft of the script in 2007 and a second draft commenced soon afterword.  

Paramount did release a movie called Area 51 in 2015, directed by Paranormal Activity's Oren Peli.  Peli's Area 51 was a standalone project and not an adaptation of the Midway game. 

Morrison confirmed the movie was a dead duck in this podcast, also relaying how the producers continually asked him for re-writes in order to make it appear that the script had been written to suit various A-list stars they were courting for the lead role.

FATHOM (2008)

Film pitch for 20th Century Fox's 'indie' arm Fox Atomic.  Based on the Aspen comic by Michael Turner, Fathom is the story of an Olympic swimmer who doesn't wear a lot of clothes getting mixed up in some sort of mystical undersea shenanigans.  Fox Atomic passed on Morrison's pitch, choosing instead to buy a treatment by Jordan Mechner, creator of the Prince of Persia videogame franchise.  Though Megan Fox has been attached to the project for a number of years, as of 2025 there's still little indication that Fathom will ever make it to the big screen.

CONSULTANT ON DC SUPER HERO PROPERTIES, WARNER BROTHERS PICTURES (2008-2010)

Alongside Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman, Morrison was involved in various treatments and pitches relating to adaptations of DC Comics' superheroes for both the big and small screen.  It doesn't appear that any of the projects Morrison had input on ever made it into production.

Amongst the projects under consideration by DC/Warner Brothers during this period were Aquaman, Adam Strange, a Guy Ritchie-helmed Lobo movie (eventually ditched by Ritchie in favour of a quick cash-in Sherlock Holmes sequel); a Bizarro Superman movie from the team behind Galaxy Quest; a Constantine sequel; The Flash, Shazam; and two separate Green Arrow projects.

George Miller's aborted Justice League movie had already been cancelled by the time Johns, Morrison and Wolfman came onboard (indeed, their appointment was probably as a result of the same writer's strike that did for the movie).  At least one of the Green Arrow films - Escape from Supermax - had been in development for some time and probably didn't see much input from Johns, etc.  The Flash movie was definitely Johns' baby, as was Shazam.  Bizarro Superman was a spec script that again had been around awhile by 2008 and the Constantine sequel was in the works from the same team that made the first movie.  Wolfman's involvement seems to have been much more focused on DTV animated movies and games (the Wolfman-written DC Universe Online was released in early 2011).  Of the remaining projects that were publicly announced, Adam Strange seems like the one that's most in Morrison's wheelhouse, though after an initial call from Warner's for writers to submit pitches nothing was ever heard of it again.

In this podcast interview from July 2020, Morrison mentions that he wrote six drafts of an Aquaman movie script for Warner during this period, featuring a scene where Aquaman swims up Niagara Falls.  As far as we know, nothing from Morrison's script made it into James Wan's Aquaman movie, released in 2018.

In a November 2023 edition of Xanaduum (GM's Substack newsletter), Morrison shared some more details about their work on staff at DC during this period -

"Other pitches included Teen Titans, Doom Patrol, Green Arrow, several versions of an Aquaman story which I really liked, and a few takes on a potential Superman movie (I used some bits and pieces from the Superman stuff for my Action Comics run. One iteration of a story had a scene where a terraforming expedition is in trouble on Mars, and an alarm goes out. Cut to the Daily Planet. Lois Lane peeking in a broom closet says ‘Kent?’ while our first glimpse of Superman shows a startled pigeon on a ledge as he hurtles by in a purpling UV blur, then a kid looking out of a plane window as Superman’s streaky upward progress continues, evoking ‘…is it a bird? Is it a plane?...’.

Then the Earth, seen from orbit – a tiny primary-coloured figure getting closer – closer – SUPERMAN!

Most of that sequence showed up in Action Comics #14.

(All my Superman pitches had a pre-credits cold open on pulp planet Krypton, and showed silly insignificant daily life in the city of Kandor ten seconds before the moment Brainiac arrives to shrink and bottle it for his collection. A version of this sequence appeared in Action Comics #3)"

CURSED PIRATE GIRL (2009)

Audio adaptation of Jeremy Bastian's cult comic-book.  Grant plays one of the Swordfish Brothers; the other is played by Dave McKean.  Not intended for commercial release, the adaptation was intended to be played at signings and library events.  I asked Jeremy Bastian if I could snag a copy on Twitter, but, as of 2013 at least, it has yet to be finished.

BONNYROAD (2010) 

Pitched to BBC Scotland, Bonnyroad was a low-budget Scottish sci-fi/fantasy series set to be directed by Paul McGuigan and produced by  British TV personality Stephen Fry.  The pitch drew heavily on Scottish myths and legends like Brigadoon, the mysterious village that appears once every 100 years (actually invented in the 1940's for a Broadway musical but inspired by much older Celtic myths) and was written with a distinctly 'magical realist' bent, at least in part to keep costs down.  

According to this interview with Morrison, after numerous re-writes and much positive feedback, Bonnyroad was finally rejected by the BBC in 2011.

DINOSAURS VS. ALIENS (2011)

Script for Barry Sonnenfeld, director of the Men in Black movies and The Addams Family, based on Sonnenfeld's own pitch.  The first third of the script was adapted by Morrison and Mukesh Singh for a hardcover graphic novel from Liquid Comics/Graphic India in 2012 - probably intended as a vehicle to help Sonnenfeld's production company Cheyenne Enterprises pitch the movie to studios - with the same artwork being used for a motion comic version and a Free Comic Day promo book that same year.  Since the release of the graphic novel, no news has emerged of follow-up volumes, though apparently Morrison did complete the script for the movie itself.  Sonnenfeld seems to have now moved on to other projects.

ROGUE TROOPER (2011)

Mentioned as an aside in a 2011 interview with Scottish newspaper the Daily Record, Morrison worked on a treatment (and possibly a script) for a movie based on 2000AD's iconic blue infantryman for Sam Worthington's Full Clip Productions.  Worthington was also involved in the aborted 2009 Dan Dare movie that Morrison worked on for Colin Frewin and Warner Brothers.  In a 2015 interview with Slash Film, Book of Eli scriptwriter Gary Whitta (who appears to have succeeded Morrison as writer on the project), confirmed that Worthington/Full Clip's option on Rogue Trooper has now expired.

VARIOUS MARVEL PROPERTIES (????)

In the same November 2023 Substack newsletter quoted above, Morrison mentioned some of the movie/TV pitch work they'd undertaken at Marvel over the years - 

"(At Marvel I pitched a good Dr. Strange, and I did Moon Knight, Morbius, Warlock - the X-Men alien robot one – and Terror Inc. among others. My published work is the tip of a vast iceberg of written material that will never be seen!)"

Terror Inc.!  Imagine that...

Morrison mentions no dates here, and it would be interesting to know whether these pitches were for Marvel Studios or other rightsholders (e.g. the X-Men movie rights, which would've presumably covered any proposed Warlock movie, were with Fox from the 1990's through Disney acquiring the studio in 2019, and the Morbius rights are currently with Sony).

I'm going to take a wild guess that Dr. Strange, Moon Knight, Morbius and Terror Inc. were all wrapped up in the same project - something akin to Marvel's Midnight Sons line from the 90's - and that this was maybe some kind of follow-up or spin off of the Wesley Snipes/New Line Cinema Blade movies from the early 00's.  That being said, the only rumour (as far as I know) regarding a Terror Inc. adaptation concerned a Disney+ TV show that paused development in 2025.  So maybe this is all much more recent than I'm guessing?

I'll keep looking into it and let you know if I turn anything up!