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Bible epics are so in right now as evident Noah and the upcoming Exodus: Gods and Kings, and thanks to the combined efforts of Godzilla and Guillermo del Toro, monster movies are also back in vogue. So, like pious peanut butter and unimaginable chocolate carnage these two great genre tastes have come together for a David and Goliath movie.
Well, sort of. It’ll actually by a post-Goliath David and Goliath movie, but if we’re lucky, we’ll still get an awesome Goliath corpse “elephant graveyard” scene.
First reported by Variety, the working title for the film is David, and it’ll be coming from the same team currently hard at work making the story of Moses into something more interesting than your average Sunday school class. Ridley Scott will be producing the film along with Chernin Entertainment (20th Century Fox will reign over all), while Jonathan Stokes will handle the screenplay.
Variety mentions that Scott may direct, but he’s got a lot on his potential plate right now, including a Prometheus sequel and Matt Damon getting lost on his way back from Mars, so either Fox waits a long, long time to get David out the door, or they find an off-brand Ridley Scott to fill in.
Here’s the real snag, though. According to Variety, “it’s likely that the film would focus on the King’s reign post-Goliath.” And the biggest Bible story that involves David but doesn’t involve murdering the world’s tallest man is all about David and Bathsheba.
Here’s how the story goes. One day, David was casually standing on his own rooftop when he saw a young woman, doing the very same on a roof of her own. Only, she was naked. And extremely attractive. So David proclaimed, “I am so totally going to have sex with her,” and being the king, his proclamation came true (it’s argued whether the sex was rape or consensual adultery, but either way, King David is doing a seriously bad deed).
Then Bathsheba got pregnant. So David whisked her husband Uriah home and tried to get the couple to sex each other and destroy the evidence, but Uriah wouldn’t, citing an ancient Biblical rule that doin’ it during wartime is extremely uncool. So David sent Uriah back to the front lines where he promptly died a horrible death.
David wins! Until the truth comes out, David’s infant son dies and a new king takes the throne thereby cutting off David’s royal bloodline.
So David will be just like Exodus, with the epic battle scenes and an actor of Christian Bale’s caliber murdering people, Bible-style. Only it’ll all be built around the beating heart of a Days of Our Lives episode.And it’ll be competing with an independent, Christian movie version of David and Goliath that will almost certainly contain none of the graphic sexual violence, but will definitely contain a poor-quality green screen Goliath.
At least, after Noah and Exodus, we’re starting to get into the seedier parts of the Bible. Finally, after being picked last behind such morally righteous heroes as “Moses,” and “Jesus,” the Bible characters that revel in Biblical terribleness are getting their fair shake.