Ice Cream Man, the ongoing horror anthology series from Image Comics by W. Maxwell Prince, Martín Morazzo, and Chris O’Halloran, is one of our absolute favorites here on Comic Book Club. And now that comic book is being developed into a potential movie, produced by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, aka the team behind Wednesday and the writers of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
The news comes via THR, which adds that Aaron Schmidt, who produced 2019’s Child’s Play and the TV series Just Beyond is also on board.
Ice Cream Man doesn’t exactly have a plot, as it were. The book is loosely tethered by the titular Ice Cream Man, Rick, who may be sent from hell itself and might be in an eternal struggle with his “good” opposite. Caleb. Or, maybe not. As Prince and Morazzo told Comic Book Club when they appeared on our live show, the “plot” is far from the point. Instead, the book is a chance for the team to experiment with everything from done-in-one Twilight Zone-style stories; to a recent two-issue arc that delved into opposite sides of a car crash over the course of five seconds, while working as a deconstruction of decompression in comic books.
You can see how this would naturally translate into a movie, right? Just kidding, I have no idea how this will work. And, as it turns out, neither do a few other folks. Ice Cream Man was originally picked up by UCP (Universal Cable Productions) as a potential series in 2018. In 2020, it moved over to Quibi, though the only “quick bite” that the service provided was “quickly biting it.” The series was still in development as of 2021, and now it’s potentially going to end up as a movie.
Gough and Millar are well known to the geek community as the creators of Smallville, and writers on Spider-Man 2. However, they’ve been on a hot streak lately with the Netflix series Wednesday, and the Beetlejuice sequel which is looking to have a huge opening weekend as of this writing. No writer is attached to the project as of this time.