ComingSoon.net’s comic book movie site SuperHeroHype had a chance last summer to visit the Toronto set of Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which you can get a brief taste of below:
For at least a year or more, buzz has been swirling around Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the upcoming movie from Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz). With less than three months leading up to its release, that buzz has become quite contagious even to those who hear of the movie and immediately wonder, “Who the heck is Scott Pilgrim?” Whether you already know that answer or whether you’ve been scratching your head wondering what the big deal is yourself, SuperHeroHype had a chance to visit the set last summer, flying into Toronto straight from Comic-Con to see for ourselves what Wright and company had planned.
The source material for Wright’s new movie is a different type of comic book, revolving around the relationships of one Scott Pilgrim, the somewhat dopey and thoroughly clueless 23-year-old bass player for the Toronto band Sex Bob-omb and a chronic slacker who doesn’t have any other job. When he meets the ultra-hip and stylish Ramona Flowers, an American chick from New York, and he falls head over heels with her, not realizing at the time that Ramona has a reputation for dumping boyfriends poorly, and in order for Scott to be her boyfriend, he’ll have to fight and defeat her seven evil exes.
Named after an obscure ’90s song by Canadian girl group Purebreed, Scott Pilgrim is sort of heroic in his desperate willingness to fight for Ramona’s love, yet creator Brian Lee O’Malley would probably cringe at the thought of a site called “SuperHeroHype” writing about the movie based on his characters. O’Malley has been telling Scott’s story over the course of six compact-sized graphic novels, the first volume which was published by Oni Press in July 2004, the final volume arriving this coming July just in time for the release of the movie. O’Malley’s distinctive knack for mixing slacker humor, relationship drama, video game inspired action and Manga-influenced art styling made it one of those infectious comics that was easier to suggest to friends by lending them your copies, rather than sounding silly by trying to describe them. Most people who’ve read them immediately recognize its quirky brilliance for combining disparate elements into one of those comics that is impossible to put down or read just one.
In January 2009, Edgar Wright and company set up camp in Scott’s hometown to start the ambitious project of turning O’Malley’s densely-plotted work into a cohesive movie. Ten months later and Wright is still hard at work on the post-production of the movie, having done recent reshoots to include some of the cooler sequences from Volume 6, “Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour,” which will arrive just in time for Comic-Con.
You can read the rest of the set visit over on SuperHeroHype!
