Heavy Metal to Adapt Comic 'Roche Limit' With 'Leatherface' Writer

Sci-fi comic Roche Limit is heading to the big screen.

Heavy Metal, the media company that began life as the venerable fantasy magazine, has optioned the movie rights to the Image Comic created by Michael Moreci.

Heavy Metal’s Jeff Krelitz, David Boxenbaum and newly installed president Brian Witten, who are developing and producing the feature, are moving fast and have already set a writer to adapt the material: Seth Sherwood, the screenwriter behind Leatherface, the upcoming origin film of the iconic horror character from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies.

Limit is set in a space colony that has devolved into a melting pot of criminal factions. The plot follows a mystery centered on a missing girl while mixing in shades of horror.

The comic was initially a five-issue story published in 2014. Moreci, who is also the creator of comic Hoax Hunters, that Heavy Metal is also developing as an adaptation, is in the middle of a second five-issue story arc titled Roche Limit: Clandestiny that keeps the setting but sets the story in a different time period and even subgenre with a new art team. Moreci has plans for a third storyline to complete a trilogy.

The goal with the feature is to adapt the first storyline.

“It’s such a unique book and it needs that particular vision,” Moreci tells The Hollywood Reporter. “To have people that really get it, I think it makes a difference.”

Sherwood is repped by UTA and Kailey Marsh Management. Moreci is repped by Jason Yarn Management.