WWW- Indiana Jones, meet Jack Sparrow. Jim Uhls, who successfully adapted the “unadaptable” Chuck Palahniuk novel “Fight Club,” has been hired to turn “Rex Mundi,” a series of graphic novels by Arvid Nelson and Eric Johnson, into a feature for Johnny Depp to star in and produce through his Infinitum Nihil (Infinite Nothing) production company.
“Rex Mundi” (King of the World) posits an alternate present of 1933 in which the Reformation never happened, the Inquisition is still in full swing, Europe remains dominated by the Catholic Church and the rest of the world consists of colonies. Depp, who became the biggest movie star in the world this summer by reprising his Keith Richards-inspired swashbuckler, would play a pathologist investigating the mysterious death of the priest who found him as an orphan.
“It’s a noir-ish ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ ” Uhls says. “There are murders and a mystery, and the lead character discovers a massive conspiracy, biblical in its origin.” Though it may sound an awful lot like a “Da Vinci Code” rip-off, Depp will surely sport less offensive hair than Tom Hanks, even if he decides to base this new character on John Lydon (Johnny Rotten).