More than three months after dropping Bryan Singer from its upcoming Red Sonja movie, Avi Lerner’s Millennium Films has finally found his replacement.
Jill Soloway has officially joined the project as a writer and director. For those unfamiliar with their work, award-winning Soloway is the creator of Amazon series Transparent, which is set to conclude with a fifth and final season (in the form of a feature-length musical) later this year.
They also served as a co-executive producer and writer on HBO’s excellent 2001 series Six Feet Under, and has written episodes of Dirty Sexy Money, Grey’s Anatomy and Tell Me You Love Me.
The character of Red Sonja was created by writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith for Marvel Comics in 1973, and made her first appearance in Conan The Barbarian #23. She was partially based on Robert E Howard’s characters Red Sonya of Rogatino and Dark Agnes de Chastillon. She is a sword-master in peak human physical condition and a martial arts expert, with much knowledge and experience of fighting the supernatural, and is famous for her bikini armour made of scale mail.
Singer was fired from Red Sonja earlier this year after a string of sexual assault and misconduct accusations were made against him. Singer continues to deny the allegations.
Red Sonja isn’t the only film to cut ties with Singer — the director was also fired from Bohemian Rhapsody last year after repeated absences from the set and replaced by Eddie The Eagle and Rocketman‘s Dexter Fletcher.
The choice to replace Singer with Soloway is rather fitting, given that Soloway wrote Transparent lead Jeffrey Tambor out of the show for the final season after two sexual harassment allegations were made against the actor. They clearly don’t put up with BS.
Soloway is also a big supporter of the #MeToo movement against and came out as non-binary and gender non-conforming following their work on Transparent, and uses singular they pronouns.
Red Sonja doesn’t yet have a release date. Get all the latest sci-fi news with every issue of SciFiNow.