Can Sony Kill Bloodshot?
Sony has a 5 movie deal in place with Valiant Entertainment to produce movies based on their character line. The proposed schedule has 2 Bloodshot movies, 2 Harbinger movies, and a final Harbinger Wars movie. This should help bring those under-appreciated characters/story lines into the limelight.
Bloodshot is a former soldier with powers of regeneration and meta-morphing made possible through nanites injected into his blood. After having his memory wiped numerous times, he is out to discover who he really is and get vengeance on those who did this to him. His bloodstream contains a billion nanocomputers, enabling him to heal from injuries quickly, interface with technology, and shape shift his mass. However, his oxygen-starved brain has lost its memories.
Project Rising Spirit’s program to create the ultimate soldier stretches back decades, and reached critical mass in the depths of World War II. Though the initial products of the program were crudely enhanced and highly expendable foot soldiers suitable only for the simplest scenarios, these early subjects were able to complete high-intensity missions regardless of any obstacles. Over the decades, these results ensured that the “Bloodshot” program was consistently earmarked for future development and continued to break new ground.
Throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, P.R.S. redefined the nanotechnology that would power Bloodshot, and develop a new artificial intelligence system that allowed him to be deployed in a wider array of off-the-battlefield counterintelligence and espionage missions. While he was self-aware to a degree, the human-machine hybrid was still deemed to inflict unacceptably high levels of collateral damage. In 2007, another P.R.S. scientist, Dr. Emmanuel Kuretich, discovered his employers’ intention to redirect the Bloodshot program in to a new area: the targeting and capture of the extremely rare, psionically powered children called “psiots.” Alarmed, Kuretich fled P.R.S. for Toyo Harada’s Harbinger Foundation, where he secretly began forging a plan to undo P.R.S.
Several years later, while on a routine mission in Afghanistan, Bloodshot is captured by Kuretich, who forcibly extracts the records of his missions with the intent of exposing Project Rising Spirit to the world. The process, however, unlocks all of Bloodshot’s false memories, which had been used to motivate him in war zones throughout the world, all at once.
P.R.S., fearing that Bloodshot has finally gone rogue, decides to rein him in. He escapes capture with the aid of an ambulance driver named Kara Murphy before finally returning to P.R.S. to uncover the truth behind his identity. Tipped off by Kuretich, He storms a P.R.S. facility in Nevada, but finds only the sub-basement facility known as the Nursery. Built to house the empowered psiot children captured by Bloodshot, freeing the Nursery’s captives has been Kuretich and Harada’s true objective all along. He is forced to combat the Nursery’s sadistic psiot jailer Gamma and P.R.S.’s outdated cyborg hit squad Chainsaw. Bloodshot frees the captive children, including generation Zero, an action that inadvertently sets off a chain reaction of events that would cumulate in the Harbinger Wars in the Las Vegas Strip.
Confronted by Toyo Harada in the aftermath of the P.R.S. breakout, Bloodshot’s capacity for free will is overridden by the “Harada Protocol”, a piece of hidden P.R.S. programming that compels him to terminate Harada. A vicious battle ensues, which leaves Harada seriously wounded, and Bloodshot with a depleted nanite count.
In the closing moments of the Harbinger wars, Bloodshot again falls into Harada’s clutches, and spends several weeks as a prisoner of the Harbinger Foundation. During this time, Harada subjects Bloodshot to cruel and painful experiments as he attempts to solve the secret behind the incredibly rare nanites in Bloodshot’s bloodstream.
However, Project Rising Spirit quickly expedites a rescue led by the H.A.R.D. Corps. After storming Harada’s El Segundo facility, they successfully extract Bloodshot, who shortly thereafter accepts a spot on the H.A.R.D. Corps roster. Bloodshot is rewarded with a hard copy of the P.R.S. file on his true identity.
Bloodshot is deployed across the globe on various missions alongside the H.A.R.D. Corps, including as assignment to retrieve a former P.R.S. test subject code-named Prodigal and his supposedly “immortal” bodyguard.
