He’s not the most likely choice for action hero, but Warner Bros is
banking on turning Leonardo Da Vinci into just that. They’ve just picked
up a treatment titled Leonardo da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever from
producer Adrian Askarieh, who’s teamed up with Roy Lee and Doug Davison
from Vertigo.

While the real Da Vinci was of course a famous painter and inventor (to
say the least) he’s never exactly been portrayed as a badass. The
closest a portrayal of  him has come to that was probably last year in Assassin’s Creed 2. In the game he appeared as a comic-relief sidekick character that supplied
main character Ezio with weapons and gadgets, like a Renaissance Q.

In Soldiers of Forever he’ll be doing all his fighting himself. It will reveal that he is actually a member
of a secret society that finds him fighting against Biblical demons in
“a story involving secret codes, lost civilizations, hidden fortresses
and fallen angels.” Ahh, if only the genius could see how we revere him centuries later with silly adventure films. Askarieh is now looking for a writer for the project.

If this seems eerily similar to Sherlock Holmes, well of course it does.
That movie was a success and WB wants to emulate it with more period
action/adventure films. Two cases in point- Guy Ritchie’s doing King Arthur next,
and the studio also just picked up a pitch for a supernatural Marco Polo
flick. I eagerly await future films that show Charles Dickens fighting off figments of his imagination, and Christopher Columbus battling Poseidon trident-a-trident. Don’t let me down, Hollywood.

Via THR