Thought Bubble ‘09: ‘The Losers’ Update

Taking place as part of this year’s Thought Bubble event, was the From Comics to Digital panel featuring Jock, Andy Diggle, Paul Cornell, and Adi Granov. As with any discussion on comic book movies talk turned to upcoming movies, more specifically the adaptation of Jock and Andy Diggle’s The Losers.

Whilst neither one was giving away any real secrets about the film, they did spill a couple of interesting details about what we can expect to see in the movie:

Apparently during casting, Andy Diggle was concerned that Zoe Saldana was too pretty and frail looking to play Aisha. However any fears were allayed when he and Jock were shown footage of a brutal knock down, drag out fight between Saldana and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Jock even went as far as saying he’d “…not seen anything like it before”.

We also got confirmation on some of the changes in the film adaptation The Losers – besides the obvious change in ethnicity in Idris Elba’s character Roque, the filmmakers have also changed the origins of Saldana’s Aisha from Afghanistan to South American, however in a strange coincidence, the character was originally set to come from Bolivia until DC/Vertigo asked for it to be changed, everything comes full circle it seems.

However one major change we were told about was that of the film’s villain. In the movie version of The Losers, the villain has been de-politicised and changed from a more neo-conservative character to, as Andy Diggle put it, “a generic bad guy”. It’s disappointing that Hollywood still feels the need water down the villain’s political views to give the film as wide an appeal as possible. But what are they going to do when some of the US’s largest markets are full of the same neo-conservative types..?

The Losers is scheduled for an April 16th, 2010 release.