John Boyega to star in The Book Of Eli prequel show

The show, if it gets picked up somewhere, will star John Boyega as a young version of Eli, the character Denzel Washington played in the movie. To say pretty much anything about Eli or his book would constitute a spoiler, but the twists at the end of the movie are so heavily telegraphed that it seems kind of insulting to pretend we don’t know what they are 14 years after the movie came out, so let’s just lay it all out there: Eli is a wanderer who travels the post-apocalypse United States protecting a special book—the Bible—from a bad guy who wants to use it to control people. Also Eli is blind and the Bible is written in braille, effectively making it useless to anyone but him. Not bad twists, to be clear, but come on. He’s always wearing sunglasses, and how many other special books are there?

Deadline says that the TV show would take place 30 years before the events of the movie, which—in Eli canon—would set it either during or immediately after the nuclear war (or whatever) that destroyed the country. It seems likely, then, that this prequel series would be about how Eli gets his copy of this book (and maybe why there don’t seem to be any other copies of the Bible anywhere else in the wasteland, though that is sort of touched on in the original movie).