Marvel’s teen team The Runaways, written by Brian K. Vaughan was a smash almost from the very beginning.  It was the most successful completely original concept in decades and tapped into a large female audience when Marvel printed it in the smaller “digest” format which appealed to Manga fans.  The book centered on a group of teens who discover their parents are secretly super villains.  The kids inherit their parent’s super abilities but decide (mostly) to use their gifts for good.

It only makes sense that the book would be adapted to a movie!  Unfortunately, the endeavor has struggled since it was announced.  First in 2010, another film was released with the name ‘The Runaways’ based on Joan Jett’s original band.  Marvel’s movie then had to find a new name and it was announced that it would bear the horrible title ‘Little Faces.’  (If you ask me, that name was ‘Big Feces.’)

Now the movie is completely shelved, following the release of  ‘The Avengers’, as revealed by Drew Pearce, the movie’s co-writer (who also co-wrote ‘Iron Man 3’):

“We were really close to being made, and then this movie started to happen called The Avengers.  Oddly, it pulled focus from the unheard-of brand Runaways, and it really did kind of consume the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s there, maybe it’ll be a Phase Three movie, I really hope so, I’m really proud of it and I think it’ll be a brilliant film, but I think it all depends what Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel, what his master plan is.”

‘Iron Man 3’ director Shane Black calls Pearce’s script “one of the better screenplays that’s sitting on a shelf somewhere.”

Unfortunately, ‘The Runaways’ hasn’t really been mentioned in discussions of upcoming Marvel movies.  In fact, to be quite honest, ‘The Runaways’ was one of the worst cases of “jumping the shark” in comics.  I get the “kill your darlings” mentality, but once… ahem, a certain character was killed, the book never recovered.  It was eventually cancelled.  Then it was brought back.  And cancelled again.

Recently, two of the stars of the book, Nico and Chase were dragged into the ‘Avengers Arena’ series and bad, bad things happened to them.  (Boo!)

So maybe ‘The Runaways’ time has simply passed.  Too many of the original characters have been killed off.  There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the team will get another comic book in the near future, so I’m not sure they can support their own movie.  Plus, if they follow the comic book’s story closely, we’re just all in for heartache again anyway.

Source: THR