I'll bet you money the film isn't going to look like this

Credit: Ashley Wood/IDW Comics

Sony and Platinum Dunes are set to team up in bringing the IDW series "Zombies Vs. Robots" to the bigscreen, and all over the world, aspiring screenwriters commit suicide out of pure existential fear that there is no reason to even try anymore.

I like JT Petty, who evidently turned the IDW comic into a spec script called "Inherit The Earth," and I think he's an underrated screenwriter.  And Chris Ryall and Ashley Wood actually did create something pretty cool with the original series.  It's lean and mean as a book, focused on a sort of philosophical war between three mad scientists who are responsible for the zombie apocalypse and the creation of sentient robots, and the one baby left, a little girl, is the thing they pitch their struggle over.  The artwork in the book was beautiful and strange, and worked as a sort of expressionist take on genre.

Platinum Dunes being involved makes me think this is going to be a whole lot less expressionist and a whole lot more conventional when and if it does make the jump to the bigscreen.  That's just the nature of the thing.  It wasn't until later, after the initial book, that Ryall and Wood expanded the world and started telling more human-centric stories.

There is certainly potential here, as there is in most genre fare, to use the outsized, broad ideas to get at something honest and universal, and I think JT Petty is smart enough to take advantage of the opportunities.  Most people are going to look at this announcement and just see Michael Bay's name and immediately base their reaction on that, but Platinum Dunes is just part of the equation here.

Ultimately, I'm curious to see which parts of the story that Ryall and Wood created end up in the script, and who they sign on to direct.

And if you're starting to feel like you've got zombie fatigue, we'll be discussing that later today in a piece about the newest movie monster that Hollywood can't get enough of, and some of the interesting ways the literary community has tried to wring new life out of these reanimated corpses.

We'll have more on this one as it comes together.