Ron Howard to Direct Lovecraft Film?

Who would have counted Ron Howard, famous for his roles as film director and earlier as Opie in The Andy Griffith Show, as a fan of H.P. Lovecraft? Many sources across the internet are reporting this is the case as a result of this report from "Variety" on Howard and Imagine Entertainment expressing intense interest in making a cinematic version of the upcoming comic "The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft." This is an even more remarkable development when considering the comic the film is to be based on hasn't even hit stores yet. It is scheduled to be released next month.

This brainchild of Mac Carter, Adam Byrne, and Tony Salmons is one of this year's most anticipated projects utilizing H.P. Lovecraft as a protagonist in his own fiction. It's another case of positioning the imagined heroic Lovecraft as a titan who battles nefarious forces similar to those described in his literary works. The curiously well documented life of HPL (mostly through the mountains of correspondence he produced), alongside earlier trends pioneered by other writers in Cthulhu Mythos fiction that used the writer himself as a character, has made storylines like these workable. Interested readers may pick up this new take on the heroic Lovecraft this spring from Image Comics. And we all may see a movie materialize in the next few years, if interest stays firm enough to sufficiently grease the right wheels in Hollywood's production.

-Grim Blogger