'Rome Sweet Rome': Reddit Thread Gets A Movie Deal

It started as a hypothetical question, one of countless musings proposed by frequenters of the social news and conversation site. Soon, though, users at Reddit.com were enthralled by the equally hypothetical answer, and soon, Rome was hypothetically under siege.

Now, it's going to be a movie, nothing hypothetical about it.

Variety reports that Warner Bros has bought the rights to produce a film out of James Erwin's story, "Rome Sweet Rome," which began as a response to a Reddit pondering over whether a Marine unit could take down the entire Roman empire. The story, which Erwin will pen in screenplay form, brings a Marine Exploratory Unit to Rome in 23 BC, as a conspiracy to overthrow Caesar grows. They alter history, then have to put it back on track to return back to the present, where they were fighting in Afghanistan.

Erwin is an experienced writer, having penned encyclopedias and other manuals over the past decade. He received help and lots of ancillary material from Reddit users; as he told Screen Rant last month, as heat on the project was building, he feels quite lucky to be in this position.

"Here's the thing. I was very, very lucky to post what I did at the moment I did," he said. "It wasn't just the idea of coming up with just the right answer - if I'd posted the same text an hour later, everyone would already be bored with the question. They wouldn't have seen it and it wouldn't have blown up. So that was definitely a lightning-in-a-bottle situation."

For more, click over to Variety. To read the entire story Erwin created on Reddit, click here to download the PDF for free.

Comments

[Helzapoppin]

08:29 AM on 10/17/2011

Final Countdown (1980)? LOL there's nothing new under the sun.

[Quotidien]

07:41 AM on 10/17/2011

Original, creative. I'll take it over any remake.

[hanrobecowen]

06:36 PM on 10/15/2011

I dunno. Sounds weird. Different. I think it could be fun!

[Master Bates]

12:52 PM on 10/15/2011

What a stupid premise!

[m66]

09:35 AM on 10/15/2011

I hate to bet against the home team, but the city of Rome alone had a population of one million, who conquered the world on foot, and killed each other for fun. The entire USMC doesn't have enough ammo, never mind one unit.

[HenryMcMullen3]

07:49 PM on 10/14/2011

As long as it's not shot like '300', I think it sounds fascinating.

[ligligl]

03:59 PM on 10/14/2011

A Marine unit beat Rome? R U kidding? They can't even beat the Taliban...

[jokamachi]

04:41 PM on 10/14/2011

Tell that to the die-hard right wing types. Without our military, the fundamental identity of this nation changes significantly. And we can't have that.

[LittleSanityLeft]

04:44 PM on 10/14/2011

Two completely different fighting styles makes this a non-comparison.

[whomod]

03:36 PM on 10/14/2011

Heh. Love it.

Every time i watch Braveheart, i ponder the same thing, as to how these battles would fare with the Scottish having a few tanks and black hawk helicopters at their disposal.

[Jetwash]

03:08 PM on 10/14/2011

Star Trek did this type of story back in the original series---not as bloody or violent but same concept of time travel and triggering a paradox that alters the present. See City on the Edge of Forever. "Do you know what you just did, Jim? I could have saved her!"

[ellisclevenger]

10:03 PM on 10/14/2011

"He knows, Doctor. He knows." My favorite episode of STAR TREK. I'm glad someone else remembers the cutting-edge conceptions.

[JackDeath]

02:22 AM on 10/15/2011

Ooooh! That story was written by Harlan Ellison, who is notorious for suing studios who borrow from his original work (just ask James Cameron). Hope they put miles of creative distance from "City..." or there will be Harlan to pay.

[Jack Davies]

02:25 PM on 10/14/2011

If this doesn't star Sam Worthington, I will eat my hat.

[BlackJAC]

02:21 PM on 10/14/2011

I take it they never read the Harry Turtledove novel The Guns of the South, where 21st-century South African neo-Nazis alter the outcome of the Civil War by traveling back in time and selling AK-47s to the Confederacy.

[paddy523]

05:39 PM on 10/14/2011

Harry's the master of alternate history!!!

[3echo9]

01:51 PM on 10/14/2011

Based on a true story.

[3fingerbrown]

02:25 PM on 10/14/2011

"No Vestal Virgins were harmed during the making of this film."

[coloagnt]

01:22 PM on 10/14/2011

Sounds like a fun and interesting concept, with history, time travel and a clash of different culture/time and technological differences. Imagine the looks on Romans of 23BC as soon as they were to see these flying helicopters of the current time?!

[jokamachi]

01:13 PM on 10/14/2011

The Romans would eat them for breakfast.

[Spartan112]

01:33 PM on 10/14/2011

the 5 left after the rest got mowed down by machine gun fire?

[jokamachi]

01:54 PM on 10/14/2011

I meant in hand to hand combat. Oh, you meant they would hide behind their machine guns? Yeah, they would have to... because Marines don't know the first thing about close quarter combat. The Romans would gut every one of them inside 15 minutes.

[WoodsideCraig]

12:53 PM on 10/14/2011

Well, Cortez did it in Mexico with a lot less Ammo, so I suppose it's possible.

The only problem is that in Mexico, the natives were following rules of engagement that greatly hampered their effectiveness. They tried to take people alive rather than killing and they thought that surprise attacks were dishonorable. Romans on the other hand, understood fighting pretty well.

[Jetwash]

03:06 PM on 10/14/2011

Yeah, and you forgot about the biological warfare Cortez unleashed in smallpox which devastated the Aztecs before the final battle and spread all the way down to the Incan empire by the time Pizarro arrived to enslave them.

[ligligl]

04:05 PM on 10/14/2011

Cortez didn't 'unleash' anything. He didn't know asnything about it and it was happenstance, plus the fact that the Aztecs kind of pulled their punches because they were fighting 'Gods"