Tom Morello to Executive Produce Teen Comedy ‘Metal Lords’ for Netflix

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Heavy metal movies are surprisingly hard to get right. The genre usually follows three routes: glitzy rock-star biopic, insane boner comedy, or self-important Oscar bait where metal is used as a backdrop but looked down on throughout. However, as heavy music’s forefathers are getting older, they’re beginning to throw their two cents into the movies surrounding their favorite music. Case in point, Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello has been recently announced as the executive producer of Metal Lords, a new comedy from Netflix.

According to Blabbermouth, Metal Lords will be a “coming of age story” written by D.B. Weiss and produced by Weiss and Greg Shapiro, with David Benioff acting as another of the film’s executive producers. Weiss and Benioff are most famous for co-creating HBO’s Game of Thrones. Peter Sollett (Nick And Norah’s Infinite Playlist) will direct the movie, with Jaeden Martell, Isis Hainsworth and Adrian Greensmith starring in the film.

The movie is apparently about two kids who want to start a heavy metal band “in a high school where exactly two kids care about heavy metal.”

More on this as it comes.

Hopefully, Metal Lords bypasses the pitfalls experienced by Amazon’s Sound of Metal, a film that, while a harrowing story about hearing loss, really used metal as an interesting setting while not attempting to understand it, or the people who make it.

“Worst of all, Sound of Metal commits a sin of which Lords of Chaos and Rock Star are equally guilty: there’s no metal music in it,” wrote The Pit’s Chris Krovatin. “All three of these films are hung with the fashion and attitude of heavy metal, but it apparently never occurred to the directors that the music is the most important part of metal culture (hell, Sound of Metal has ‘metal’ in the fucking title, and we never hear a full metal song). Had they taken metal seriously, the makers of these films would’ve found awesome examples of heavy music with which to soundtrack their movies, which would in turn show why these stories are important in the first place. Instead, they use metal as a costume; the art itself isn’t worth giving screen time. People might get scared off by the big loud noises.”