City of Heroes Moves to Hollywood

How do you keep a successful genre booming with a finite amount of comic book material? License a franchise that is based on the creation of thousands of characters. Producer Tom DeSanto (Transformers, X-Men 2) has acquired the film rights to NCSoft and Cryptic Studio's MMORPG City of Heroes. DeSanto's long-term plan reportedly includes a live-action feature film, with the series eventually transitioning to television. The franchise has already been fleshed out by several City of Heroes novels, in addition to a pair of comic book series. According to Sci-Fi, the movie's story will involve a group of superheroes who live in Paragon City and team up to fight an invasion of aliens called the Rikti. The third City of Heroes novel was titled The Rikti War, and was set to be released by CDS Books in August of 2006. The book was dropped from CDS' schedule last year. City of Heroes isn't the only MMORPG-related property being brought to the silver screen. Blizzard signed its own deal last year with Legendary Pictures to produce a live-action film based on its Warcraft universe. The quest to produce a satisfying video game movie continues.