Warner walks on 'Wild side'

Self, Engleman to produce pic

By MICHAEL FLEMING

Self

Engleman

Warner Bros. has acquired "The Wild," a drama pitch by tyro scribe Tim Rollins about an Earth left swarming with dangerous, rapidly evolving organisms in the wake of genetic tinkering.

Pic will be produced by "Road to Perdition" scribe David Self and Tom Engleman, who most recently produced "Pitch Black" and "The Last Samurai." Self hatched the idea, but it was fleshed out into a viable movie idea by Rollins, who has been Self's assistant and protege.

"The idea is that humankind, or what is left of it, has been evacuated off the planet after a corporation introduced a genetically engineered food crop that caused animals to mutate into these cool but scary creatures," Self said. "This was an idea I had that Tom had bought a while ago. But it didn't come together until Tim came up with a great take, a trimmed-down version that made it a personal story."

WB exec Lionel Wigram will shepherd the pic.

"The Wild" will be the first film to be produced by Self, and the project marks the second such deal WB has made in the past month. Studio just bought "Kashmir," a drama to be scripted by Dan Weiss and produced by "Troy" scribe David Benioff. Weiss has long been a sounding board for Benioff and has been the first person to read his scripts and novels.

As a writer, Self has completed a draft for a live-action adaptation of the Marvel Comics character Sub-Mariner, which he will exec produce for Universal. For U he is also writing and exec producing "The Wing," a WWI flying picture to be produced by Kathleen Kennedy. It is a potential project for director Jonathan Mostow.