ONCE UPON A TIME
THE
IN SAN FRANCISCO
BLACK HATCHET
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - LOGLINE - SYNOPSIS - PITCH DECK
POSTER
PITCH DECK
ONE-PAGER
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - THE BLACK HATCHET
GOALS: To option the script, sequels, comics and stories. To be hired to write and rewrite scripts. Producer role.
TITLE: The Black Hatchet
SCREENPLAY LENGTH: 91 Pages
PROOF-OF-CONCEPT ANIMATED COMIC BOOKS: Three Comics (Adapted from the screenplay)
GENRE: Action, Adventure, Revenge, Martial Arts, Thriller, Historic, Epic
TONE: Brutal, Mythic, Operatic
SETTING: 1906 San Francisco, Barbary Coast, Gold Rush Tunnels, Opium Dens, Alleys, Citywide Quake & Inferno
DEMOGRAPHICS: Adult, Female, Male, Asian, Multicultural, Diverse
BUDGET: TBD SHOOT: TBD
FRANCHISE READY IP
Based on real people, true stories and events.
This is a big, pulpy, period movie with a real hook: a scarred brother becomes Black Hatchet and cuts through San Francisco’s underworld as the city itself burns.
The concept is clear, the world is vivid, and the climax has event-movie scale – this is the kind of material that can sell on premise if the budget and package are disciplined.
However, this is not just another revenge-action-adventure-historical-martial arts-thriller. It is an origin myth. A franchise-ready antihero. A brutal, visually striking, rarely explored period world audiences have never seen before.
In the spirit of The Crow, Gladiator, John Wick, The Revenant, Gangs of New York and Fist of Fury comes a ferocious, mythic story set against one of America’s most dangerous underworlds. San Francisco. 1906. The Barbary Coast.
The Black Hatchet is a high-stakes, high-octane, emotionally and character driven epic that fuses visceral action with moral complexity – exploring justice versus vengeance, faith versus fury, and the unbreakable bond between brother and sister featuring the 1906 earthquake and firestorm as a third-act apocalypse.
In summation, the Black Hatchet is a compelling, haunting meditation on guilt, grief and redemption purposely written as a new IP in the highest revenue generating and most profitable genres to exploit global franchise potential.
The legend is ready to rise.
ISSUE 2 ANIMATION - FRONT COVER
LOGLINE
A ghost vigilante rises from the shadows – twin blades parched for justice, vengeance in his veins. When Hatchet Men sex traffickers abduct his sister, a scarred cowboy reborn as the Black Hatchet carves a savage path, racing against time to save her before she’s shipped to Shanghai.
THE STORY
San Francisco, 1906. A city rotting beneath its own excess. The Barbary Coast is ruled by opium dens, brothels, underground fight pits, and the iron grip of Chinese Tong syndicates.
When rugged young cowboy Malcolm Hutchins arrives with his fourteen-year-old sister Rose for a cattle auction, they stumble into this criminal abyss. Tong Hatchet Men ambush them in the streets – Malcolm is left for dead with his face slashed open, and Rose vanishes into a trafficking pipeline bound for Shanghai.
Scarred, shattered, and consumed by guilt, Malcolm retreats to his family ranch near Mt. Shasta, seeking help from his blood brother White Crow, chief of the Okwanuchu people and master of obsidian hatchet warfare.
Before they can mount a rescue, Malcolm’s world collapses again: highwaymen burn the ranch to the ground, killing his parents in the flames.
With nothing left to lose, Malcolm uses his recent, brutal training in White Crane Kung Fu under a feral Shaolin exile known as the Werewolf Monk in combination with Okwanuchu hatchet combat – and returns to San Francisco reborn as a myth whispered in alleyways: the Black Hatchet.
Armed with twin obsidian blades of justice, Malcolm prowls the Barbary Coast and begins a bloody rampage through the back-alleys, opium dens, brothels, gambling halls and fight pits, dismantling the Tong’s criminal empire while saving dozens of kidnapped girls in the process.
His endgame is the Pale Devil, an albino enforcer of the Shanghai Green Dragon Tong – the sadist who scarred him and stole Rose. Just as Malcolm closes in, the city itself explodes: an 8.3-magnitude earthquake and four-day firestorm turn San Francisco into an apocalyptic hellscape.
In flooded Gold Rush tunnels beneath the burning city, Malcolm confronts the Pale Devil in a final Hatchet-Fu showdown – where Rose must rise, fight back, and save her brother.
In one final act of heroism, Malcolm climbs a flaming church tower to extinguish the fire threatening to reignite the remaining city – then exhausted, he passes out and tumbles from the roof.
He is saved in a dramatic rescue and awakens in Lorna’s arms. Both believed the other dead. Rose close by.
The city survives. So do they. But across the Pacific, the Green Dragon Tong still reigns – and the Black Hatchet’s war has only begun.