When Duncan Jones mentioned a couple of days ago on Twitter that he was going to do a comic-book movie, most followers naturally assumed he meant Marvel or DC; certainly, he's the kind of director adept at both concepts and spectacle that would seem like a natural fit for both. And even though its box-office take was unimpressive, the heavily underrated Warcraft movie showed he could do some serious world-building on a large scale.
In a video posted to Twitter today, however, he makes it clear that he's more inclined towards the "Mega-verse," that future world from which Judge Dredd hails alongside all the other stories of the English comic 2000 AD. Aside from the two Dredd movies, this grim and satirical sci-fi scape remains a relatively untapped resource for films--perhaps because much of it is too cynical for Hollywood--though the 1990 cult film Hardware is also an adaptation.
The unique hairdo that he reveals is thought by most who've seen it to be a reference to Tor Cyan, a character spun off of Rogue Trooper, one of 2000 AD's signature characters. Before Watchmen's Dave Gibbons was drawing Dr. Manhattan, he was giving life to this blue-skinned muscleman, a genetically engineered soldier fighting a planetary civil war on a world where the atmosphere has long since become toxic.As promised... pic.twitter.com/6y3pzn2Cn1
— Duncan Jones (@ManMadeMoon) July 15, 2018

Images: 2000 AD