Way back in 2012, Coheed and Cambria maestro Claudio Sanchez announced that he was working on a feature-film adaptation of his graphic novel and New York Times best-selling series, The Amory Wars.
If you’re not familiar with the series, the plot goes a little something like this:
The Amory Wars takes place amidst a star-spanning collection of 78 planets known as Heaven’s Fence, held in place and linked together by the mysterious and seemingly omnipotent blue energy known as The Keywork. Hard-working Coheed and Cambria Kilgannon live on one of these planets, but their suburban existence is ripped apart when it is revealed that Coheed and Cambria were not born, but built as weapons for a privately developed anti-terrorist unit.
Back in 2012 at the time of the movie announcement, a few heads were turned when it was also revealed that some little-known scrub actor named Mark Wahlberg and Leverage Pictures were going to be the partners on the film.
Clearly, much time has passed since the initial news. Yet fans really still want this to happen, so much so that there’s even a Change.org petition for Netflix to turn it into a TV series or movie, with close to 30,000 signatures.
What happened with Claudio Sanchez’s The Amory Wars and Mark Wahlberg:
And now, in a fan-driven conversation with Louder, Sanchez gave some more insight into the status of the project, as well as what happened with Wahlberg’s involvement.
In response to the question of if a TV series would be considered for The Amory Wars, Sanchez says:
“Yeah! Any format at this juncture is being considered. We’ve attempted a few things: at one point, Mark Wahlberg was involved. At another, we were working with a group of creators, and these things just didn’t seem right. It’s very important that it feels right.”
And when pressed for more information about Marky Mark, he says:
“Not much, to be honest. It was just a connection sort of thing and eventually, the arrangement disintegrated.
As you go through the process, you spend the money and see, ‘I could execute this as is, but will it destroy the integrity of the story?’ Everything has to be right. It’s too important to me and the other people involved to just make it for the sake of making it.”
Sounds like it could all be chalked up to an understandable case of creative differences?
All hope might not be lost here, though. In a 2019 interview with Grammy.com, Sanchez said he still had grand plans for bringing his story to life across multiple different mediums:
“Yeah, the Mark Wahlberg agreement expired, so nothing really happened with it. But at the moment we are working with an animation company on turning the Amory Wars into either a full-length animation or sort of a serial animation.
We’re in the process of that, as well as looking to adapt the stories into board games.”