Wabbit Season 2059

FADE IN

EXT. SHATTERED CITY SKYLINE, IN RAIN – NIGHT

Its towers chipped and decaying, its grand thoroughfares now reservoirs for trash, a once-proud and glittering metropolis is a hollow, broken husk of its former self. Its self before GreatWar 2.0.

As we ZOOM IN to one particularly abandoned district, we see sporadic signs of life: fires burning in trash cans, bands of marauders roving potholed streets in search of victims: anyone on foot. Almost anyone.

MEDIUM LONG SHOT

Down a dimly-lit ALLEY off one of the serpentine streets, a figure some distance away blocks the rain-dappled light behind him. The figure, a menace of armor, moves forward. Its hulking shape announces: this is nobody’s victim. SLOWLY ZOOMING toward the figure, its details become apparent: A man, grizzled and grimy, wearing body armor head to foot, one panel bearing an identity label: “FUDD, HUNTER, CLASS 1.” He brandishes a weapon, an over-under 12-load Taser shotgun that glistens in the sparse overhead light. His eyes are fixed in a relentless focus. His mouth doesn’t move but it doesn't have to. We hear his thoughts, an incantation to himself, a mantra willing him to self-control.

FUDD (VOICE OVER)

Be vewwy … vewwy … quiet. I … am hunting wabbits.

From a working draft of “Fudd v Bugs 2059,” a post-apocalyptic live-action/animated reworking of the classic Looney Tunes cartoon tandem, now in development at Warner Brothers. In the sci-fi update, Elmer Fudd, a seasoned and ruthless casual hunter, has been biomechanically re-engineered by the government and tasked with capturing the last remaining mammal in the family Leporidae of the order Lagomorpha — a rabbit — for breeding in an environmentally depleted world.

His prey: Bugs Bunny, the wily, elusive creature who makes use of the city’s subterranean spaces, and his own survival instincts, instincts technologically sharpened by his time as a test subject in an experimental U.S. military animal-testing program. It’s cat and mouse, hunter and hunted in the nightmare world of 2059.

Tobey Maguire is reportedly on the short list for the role of the gifted hare, as is Jim Carrey. Gerard Butler is being considered for the role of Elmer Fudd; Will Smith has also been approached.

Kathryn Bigelow will direct.

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Image credit: Beanjamish, deviantART.com