Pulp action hero Remo Williams is heading to the screen once again, this time to television.
Sony Pictures Television has picked up the rights to The Destroyer, the best-selling book series featuring the character, and has teamed up with multiple Emmy nominee Gordon Smith — one of the key creative voices behind Better Call Saul — to bring it to the screen.
Smith will write and executive produce the series. Adrian Askarieh of Prime Universe Films is also on board to executive produce.
The Destroyer books center on a government operative named Remo Williams, a former cop who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and then sentenced to death. But, plot twist, his death is faked by the government just so he can be trained in an obscure martial art to be an agent of an organization named CURE.
Working outside the law (don’t they always?), Williams has defended the country since the publication of the first book, written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, back in 1971. Over 150 books have been published since then, with the heyday being in the ’70s and ’80s. In 1985, Destroyer received its first adaptation, Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. The movie, which starred Fred Ward as the hero, failed to launch a hoped-for movie series, though it did gain a cult following.
In the late ’80s, a Williams TV show was attempted but didn’t make it past the pilot stage. More recently, Shane Black, a fan of the pulp books, tried to tackle Destroyer as a feature on Sony’s movie side but it languished in development hell.
The plan for the new adaptation is to use the large library to create a “cohesive and iconic international action/adventure universe,” according to the producers, as well as to retain the sardonic humor of the books.
Smith has an overall deal with Sony Television and Destroyer falls under that pact. Smith’s first produced full-length TV script, the 2015 Better Call Saul episode “Five-O,” earned him a writing Emmy nomination, with the “Chicanery“ episode, made in 2016, landing him a second nom. As an exec producer, he shaired in the nominations for best series four times.
Smith is repped by Blue Marbel Management’s Theresa Kang and law firm of Johnson, Shapiro.
Source: Hollywood
