Greatest TV Director Alive Michelle MacLaren To Helm Chris Pratt’s COWBOY NINJA VIKING

It's really not a huge stretch to posit that Michelle MacLaren - who has helmed and produced episodes of both Game of Thones and Breaking Bad - is not only one of the greatest working television directors, but one of the greatest artists to step behind the camera in that medium's history. She's been instrumental in permanently cementing the image of what we now know to be "prestige TV", bringing a widescreen flair to small screen works that's more technically sound than most blockbusters. The fact that she's never helmed a feature up until this point ostensibly seems like a crime, until you consider that she's probably doing just fine as a titan in her own arena. 

But everyone wants to direct a movie, and MacLaren has finally settled on the project that will be her feature debut. Surprisingly, it's not an MCU entry - which this writer had easy money on for the last five years - but instead the Chris Pratt-starring comic book adaptation Cowboy Ninja Viking (so, to be fair, I was still kind of half-correct). 

Based on the Image Comics title by A.J. Lieberman and illustrator Riley Rossmo, the big screen adaptation was recently re-written by Craig Mazin (The Hangover Part III), while the original draft was penned by Zombieland scribes Paul Wernick and Everett David Reese. The second half of that last sentence makes me feel pretty good, even if the synopsis - "an assassin who manifests the toughest skills of three different personas: a cowboy, a ninja, and a viking" - still reads like total gibberish (I admittedly have not read the book, so it might be awesome). 

To be honest, this isn't exactly the movie I thought MacLaren would make the jump from TV to movies with, but anything with her name attached is 100% worth checking out. Cowboy Ninja Viking is looking to release on June 28, 2019, so it'd probably be safe to check back, as a slew of updates on casting and shooting should be hitting rather soon.