Writer-producer-director Ava DuVernay is teaming with former Arrow producer Jill Blankenship to develop DC Comics comics series Naomi for the CW.
This marks the second DC Comics-based property that DuVernay is working on. She has also been developing a feature film adaptation of Jack Kirby’s classic New Gods characters for Warner Brothers.
The character of Naomi was created by writers Brian Michael Bendis and David F. Walker and artist Jamal Campbell. A teenage girl, Naomi discovers that she is not a native of the Earth that houses most of DC Comics’s superheroes such as Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, etc. Instead, she was born on a parallel Earth but sent away as an infant by her parents to protect her from an evil superpowered conqueror on their version of Earth. Naomi discovers that she has powers of her own and can use them to travel back to her native Earth and defeat the man who had conquered her world.
If the Naomi pilot manages to get picked up for the CW, it would become the first DC Comics-based show on the network not to be coming from under the production shingle of Greg Berlanti.
The CW’s roster of DC Comics-based shows is going under some amount of churn right now. Both Supergirl and Black Lightning have been announced as that their individual seasons premiering next month will be the last for each show. The franchise does have the new series Superman And Lois debuting and the CW also has the Black Lightning spinoff Painkiller in the works. Another spinoff, Green Arrow And The Canaries, had a backdoor pilot as part of Arrow‘s final season last year, but there has been no word of whether the network is going to pick it up or not.
And of course, it is way too early to tell if Naomi will be part of the shared world that the Berlanti-produced shows all share. But even if it does take place on its own separate Earth, but the character’s own cross-dimensional Earth hopping origin doesn’t completely rule out a possible crossover.
Via Hollywood Reporter.
