J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars comic is being made into a movie

By Sam Barsanti | June 15, 2016 | 1:48am

Aux Features Film

With Disney making tons of Marvel movies and Warner Bros. making tons of DC movies, it’s easy to forget that countless other publishers have been making superhero comics for decades that have nothing to do with Marvel or DC. Plus, with those huge companies snapping up the really famous titles, the lower-profile ones can give smaller studios a chance to make comic book movies of their own. MGM is the latest one to tap into this deep well of less-famous superheroes, with Deadline reporting that it has picked up the rights to Top Cow’s Rising Stars.

The original book was created by Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski, and it’s set in a world where a bunch of people were born with superpowers after a mysterious light flew through the sky while they were in utero. The series ran for 24 issues, touching on how society would react to the sudden appearance of these super-people—dubbed “Specials”—and how the Specials might respond to each other. As it turns out, when one Special dies, the other Specials become more powerful, which ultimately results in a bunch of super-people being murdered by other super-people.