In an apparent effort not to let fans suffer too much, Columbia Pictures has acquired the rights to Preacher, the very popular, very violent comic. Their current plan seems to be to make this into a big-screen adaptation with Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) — an interesting choice — attached to direct.

Preacher was recently heading for a HBO TV series run, which most fans seemed to think was the best option; they wouldn’t have to squish all the good stuff in a two-hour movie and they could violently squish a lot more things without fear of the dreaded NC-17 rating. These plans didn’t play out, however, and the project was killed off by HBO before now being picked back up by Columbia.

Back in November 2006, it was announced that the super-violent comic called Preacher would be turned into a one-hours series on HBO. This was exciting to fans of the Garth Ennis comic book series as it promised all the necessary violence and a whole lot more than two hours of content a movie adaptation would have provided.

Now, those dreams have been slaughtered as Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil, Ghost Rider), who was trying to get the project going, has told Comics Continuum that the new head of HBO decided he didn’t like it.