Disney has announced that Surrogates, a movie adaptation of the Top Shelf graphic novel The Surrogates by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, will debut on September 25th, 2009.  Directed by Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3) and starring Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames and Radha Mitchell, Surrogates is a science fiction thriller set in a future society in which robot doppelganger’s can live out the lives of the humans in whose likenesses they were fashioned, so that the humans can experience life safely (though vicariously, see “Disney Opts for ‘The Surrogates’”).

The scheduling of Disney’s Surrogates adaptation means that another potential graphic novel sales-driving movie will debut in 2009, a year, which, largely because of the writers’ strike, will see a paucity of franchise comic-based movies (the lone exception being X-Men Origins: Wolverine).