It’s no secret Hollywood likes to plunder popular comic books for stories and heroes with which to make popcorn movies.

Toronto-based Kill Shakespeare co-creators Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery have gone one better by first creating a comic-book series based on classic William Shakespeare heroes and villains, before now developing a movie adaptation.

And to propel their screenplay forward, Del Col and McCreery have been invited to work with top Hollywood screenwriters during the New Frontier Story Lab at the Sundance film festival in late October.

“I know the people who run Sundance are huge fans of Shakespeare In Love,” Del Col quips, on the phone from Comic Con 2011 in New York City.

Thus impressed with the duo’s work so far, the Sundance Lab, to run from Oct. 23 to 28 in Park City, Utah, invited Michael Goldenberg, a writer on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, to help the duo hammer out a Kill Shakespeare screenplay that falls between the disparate worlds of Shakespeare in Love and Lord of the Rings.

Also working with Del Col and McCreery in Sundance is Marti Noxon, a writer on Fright Night, Glee and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Del Col says they initially envisioned a movie for the Kill Shakespeare property, which has the bard’s most memorable heroes, including Othello, Lady Macbeth and Juliet, on a quest to find and kill the famous Elizabethan stage writer, while his villains attempt to block their path.

But they decided to do a comic book series instead, and have completed 12 scripts with artwork that is now proving useful as they work on the second draft of the screenplay.

Del Col and McCreery will also work with video game developers at Sundance to further develop Kill Shakespeare to eventually be rolled out as a trans-media product.

“If Shakespeare was alive today he would be creating not only stage plays but films, video games, comic books and digital media,” Del Col tells Playback Daily.

The Kill Shakespeare comic book line is published by US-based IDW Publishing.

The screenplay has received seed financing Telefilm Canada, The Harold Greenberg Fund and Corus’ Made with Pay Fund.

“[Doing] Kill Shakespeare as a video game, a movie and a TV series – the whole point is to how to redefine Shakespeare for a whole new generation,” Del Col says.