V for Vendetta in development as HBO series

A V for Vendetta series is in the works at HBO, 20 years after the release of the Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving movie adaptation.

Variety reported the show is being developed at DC Studios under the aegis of James Gunn and Peter Safran, with British scribe Pete Jackson (Somewhere Boy, upcoming The Death of Bunny Munro) attached to write.

V for Vendetta was a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and first published in 1982, before it was adapted into a popular film in 2006.

The original story was set in the UK in an imagined dystopian future of the 1990s and followed the title character, the mysterious V, an anarchist vigilante fighting against the fascist government, Norsefire.

He is aided in his mission by Evey, a 16-year-old orphan, as he takes his vengeance against the cabal of villains who experimented on and tortured him at the Larkhill institution, while plotting the downfall of the government.

Moore had written the story as a response to Margaret Thatcher’s heavy-fisted Conservative government. The British story also uses the figure of Guy Fawkes, a historical figure who was instrumental in the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament.

With the film adaptation two decades later, the political context had shifted. The movie was a co-production between the US, UK and Germany and was written by the American Wachowski siblings and directed by Australian James McTeigue.

While the story was still set in the UK and culminated on Guy Fawkes Day, the filmmakers made changes, including ageing up the Evey character, who is now a young woman already in the workforce, and portrayed by a then-23-year-old Portman.

The character of V was also made more sympathetic and less ruthless in his willingness to kill to achieve his ends.

Moore, who has a crunchy relationship with adaptations of his work, didn’t approve of the big screen version. He said, “Those words, ‘fascism’ and ‘anarchy’ occur nowhere in the film. It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.”

Moore complained that the linkage of fascism and “racial purity” were no longer in the film, which he considered central to the tenets of fascism.

It will be very interesting to see how V for Vendetta will reflect the current political context in both the US and the UK, and against a rising tide of authoritarian governments around the world.

Given that it’s an American production, it seems likely the show will reference the actions and consequences of Donald Trump’s second term as US president.

Images of black-clad ICE agents raiding American cities are ripe to be dramatised in a text that, in its original form, deals explicitly with fascism and government-sanctioned violence.

The crackdown on free expression, lawsuits against media organisations and effectively banning press from the Pentagon would also make for rich material. The 2006 film even featured a talk show host character played by Stephen Fry who is executed after he satirises the Norsefire leader on TV.

Britain too also faces a surge in support for far-right political movements with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK making at different levels of government, winning 677 sears in local council elections earlier this year.

Reflecting on the legacy of V for Vendetta and its popularisation of the Guy Fawkes mask, Moore in 2022 told The Guardian, “I can’t endorse everything that people who take that mask as an icon might do in the future, of course. But I’m heartened to see that it has been adopted by protest movements so widely across the world.

“Because we need protest movements now, probably more than ever before.”