While his TV show “Flash Forward” singularly failed to become the next “Lost,” and looks almost certain to be canceled at the end of its present season, creator Marc Guggenheim seems to be doing okay. He kicked off his career writing and producing on the likes of “C.S.I. Miami”, “Brothers and Sisters” and “Eli Stone”, before breaking through into movies as one of the writers on next year’s big superhero movie “Green Lantern.”
Warner Bros are presumably happy with his work on that film, as he’s been hired to write a pair of historical actioners for the studio. First is the awkwardly-titled “Leonardo Da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever,” which, as we reported a few months back, will turn the great Renaissance artist/scientist/inventor into an Indiana Jones-style action hero, battling Biblical demons.
The second project is “Thieves of Baghdad” which will team a number of characters from the Arabian Nights stories, including Sinbad and Ali Baba, for “the biggest heist of their criminal careers.” Hey, that sounds just like 2011’s “Arabian Nights”, the Chuck Russell-directed actioner that teams Ali Baba, Sinbad and a genie! Well, if we can have two movies about how Truman Capote wrote “In Cold Blood,” we suppose we can have two Arabic supergroup movies (although we imagine both will quietly disappear if “Prince of Persia” tanks a month from now).