Marvel seems to be working a little bit backwards with their upcoming teen-oriented Runaways movie, but maybe they know what they’re doing. Last month they hired a director in Peter Sollett (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), and now this week it has been announced that they have found a screenwriter for the project as well: British scribe Drew Pearce, creator of the U.K. superhero comedy No Heroics. No Heroics ran for 6 episodes on ITV2, and although I wasn’t a huge fan of what I saw, I think Pearce could probably bring an interesting angle to this project. It’s too bad that Brian K. Vaughan couldn’t adapt his own comic, but apparently he turned in a draft that wasn’t very well-received.

The comic is about a group of kids with super powers who find out that their parents are actually super villains, so they decide to run away from home. When I wrote about it last month I mentioned that it has elements of classic kids’ movies like The Goonies, and apparently Marvel Studios President of Production Kevin Feige is well aware of the potential for that. Talking to MTV a couple of years ago he had this to say:

“I love the idea of kids banding together, discovering this thing, which I think all kids secretly wonder at one time or another whether their parents are good or evil. Well, these guys find out, unfortunately, that their parents happen to be supervillains… I loved, when I was a kid, movies like Goonies and Explorers — and a non-genre example of that is Stand by Me — the idea that when I came home from school, I could go on an adventure anywhere.”

It sounds like this movie has a lot of promise, and it should provide a nice alternative to some of the other projects Marvel currently has in development. Are you a fan of Marvel’s Runaways? Will this be better or worse than Fox’s X-Men: First Class?