Wes Ball Discusses His ‘Mouse Guard’ Adaptation

The celebrated, long-running comic series Mouse Guard is finally getting a movie thanks to the folks at 20th Century Fox who have recruited The Maze Runner franchise director Wes Ball to bring the Eisner Award-winning property to life on screen. Created, written and illustrated by David Petersen, the Eisner-winning comic series follows a brotherhood of anthropomorphic mice living in medieval times. Despite it’s cutesy sounding logline, the comic series is known for its complex characters, mature storylines, and detailed world-building.

The plan is for Ball to team with the effects and photo capture geniuses over at Weta Digital using the technology pioneered on the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy to bring a photoreal rendering of the animal-centric tale to life. Apes director Matt Reeves is on board as producer with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story screenwriter Gary Whitta penning the script.

With The Maze Runner: The Death Cure arriving on home video, Ball recent spoke with our friends over at ComingSoon and shared some new details on his vision for the project, and it sounds like if it all goes to plan, the Mouse Guard movie will be coming to theaters sooner than later and it’s going to have one heck of a budget behind it.

“Not to make any news or anything, but I think that will be my next movie. I kind of went off after this movie, had a vacation and was sort of dreaming about what could be next, but if all goes according to plan this might be it. It could be pretty special, actually. We’re just in the early stages, of course, but it’s gonna be a giant friggin’ movie. My next movie is probably going to cost what my last three movies combined cost. It’s kinda crazy, because it’s going to be one giant visual effects movie, essentially. It’s a fairly beloved little comic series, same as “Maze Runner” in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of people who love these books.”

Ball also spoke about the tone of the film, and wanting to make a movie that honors the realistic nature of the source material while appealing to audiences of all ages.

“The trick with this one is we have to thread that needle with tone. I’m not interested in doing a DreamWorks or Pixar-type movie, I’m interested in doing something closer to Planet of the Apes where you’re really gonna nail characters and show the harsh reality of what they live in. It’s gonna be a little bit of both, probably, but at the same time because of the cost I need as big an audience as possible. So I want 10-year olds to see this as much as 40 and 50-year olds, you know? That’s the needle we have to thread, but for me personally… the way Star Wars appealed to me as a kid growing up hit that tone in a weird way. It appealed to the kid in everybody but still took itself seriously. That’s really exciting to me, that kind of film, that kind of target, but obviously set in this really harsh world of mice and swords.”