10 Lesser Known Comics That NEED To Be Movies
3. Bone
Bone is a mixture of light-hearted comedy and dark fantasy thriller. It ran for thirteen years, and in that time picked up numerous awards, including ten Eisner Awards and eleven Harvey Awards.
Smith's drawings for the comic were inspired by animated cartoons and comic strips, with the three Bones akin to Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny. Fone, "Phoney" and Smiley are lost in a fairy-tale valley and during a year there, the trio makes friends, enemies, and get caught up in the trials and tribulations of the valley.
In the late 90s, Nickelodeon Movies attempted an animated adaptation, which did not work out. Smith said in an interview in 2003 that Nickelodeon wanted child actors to voice the Bone cousins, and the film's soundtrack to include pop songs by the likes of NSYNC.
Smith responded that one would never insert pop songs in the middle of The Lord of the Rings or The Empire Strikes Back, and therefore pop songs should not be placed in Bone either.
Warner Brothers brought the rights in 2008 and had an agreed plan with Smith to make a series of films. In 2011 Smith's website reported that these plans seemed on track as two scripts had been written and a third was in the works. However, nothing came to be.
Netflix announced in October 2019 that they were producing an animated series, which seems to have put an end to the Warner Brothers' plans for a trilogy of movies.
Although if there is any studio you can trust to make an animated comic book movie, it is Warner Brothers, so there is still hope this will happen.