Joe Carnahan to Write Taskmaster?

POSTED BY Alex Zalben, 04 January 2008

Remember about a month ago when director Joe Carnahan put a little tease on his blog, with a picture of the Juggernaut, and fueled speculation that he'll be directing a DVD movie of the character? Turns out, he's actually writing a Taskmaster mini-series! Whabuhhuh?

Turns out, he was talking to Marvel about a Juggernaut mini-series, but that would have conflicted with "big plans" for the character (oh, really?), so instead, he defaulted to Taskmaster. According to his official blog:

"My take on Juggernaut would have directly interfered with a major Marvel event, so I was asked to revive a character called Taskmaster and just today, about an hour ago, I got word that we were moving forward. It will be a 4-6 volume series and will commence with the events following Taskmaster's severe beat down at the hands of 'Moon Knight.' I've always been a latent comic nerd and this will represent my opening salvo into that world. I'm being given the opportunity to literally build this character's origin story as well so I'm looking forward to pushing it as much as possible."

So let's nerd out, because, well, that's what we do: I assume this will be ignoring the continuity of Taskmaster currently being in Avengers: The Initiative? Or is the Taskmaster there a Skrull? Or does it not matter? It may actually be the latter, as Carnahan updated his blog almost immediately to say:

"It's actually quite simple. I'm a f*cking moron that blabbed out of school and blew it with my Taskmaster story earlier. I preempted something that I had no business preempting. The paperwork isn't done, the ink isn't dry, so I want to revise my earlier blog entry and simply say that Marvel and I are in active talks to make this happen but until it does, it's little more than speculation. And if I've learned one hard lesson kids, it's summed up best by that oft-quoted Yogi Berra adage: 'It ain't over till it's over...' So, in the spirit of that, expect a proper update of this story in the weeks to come but until then, I must remain aggressively mum on the subject."

Ummm.... Oops? So we may never see his Taskmaster story, or this may just be a bump in the road. We shall see...Joe Carnahan, Taskmaster