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Randy McKinnon, who wrote Disney+’s football drama Safety, has been tapped to pen Warner Bros. and DC’s Static Shock.
Michael B. Jordan is producing the feature adaptation of the cult DC hero via his Outlier Society production shingle along with Reginald Hudlin, who directed Safety.
The project centers on Static, who first appeared in 1993’s Static no. 1 via Milestone Comics, a now-defunct company founded by Black writers and artists to help make comics a more inclusive space and which had distribution through DC.
A decade later the hero was revived for the Static Shock animated series, centering on Virgil Hawkins, a teenager who transforms into a superhero who gains electromagnetic powers after being exposed to strange gas. The series was noteworthy for being the rare animated show to be headlined by a Black character. The hero made his way to the mainstream DC Comics universe in 2008.
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The project has an urgency and agency surrounding it thanks to its heavy-hitting producers, who have stated an intention to build a cinematic universe centered around black superheroes.
McKinnon was a staff writer on Netflix’s horror series Chambers that starred Uma Thurman and it was with Safety that he earned his first feature credit. McKinnon tapped into his college pigskin past to tell the true story of a Clemson University freshman football player who raised his little brother on campus because of a tumultuous home life. The movie harkened back to inspirational Disney sports dramas of old when it debuted in December 2020.
McKinnon is also the creator and executive producer of the sports thriller Wild Rabbit, set up at Hulu with Reinaldo Green directing. And he is adapting Kwame Onwuachi’s memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef, for A24 with recently Oscar-nominated LaKeith Stanfield attached to star.
He is repped by CAA, Grandview, and Jackoway Austen.
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