Nia DaCosta, whose feature film career spans Marvel blockbusters and prestige literary adaptations, will direct the first two episodes of Sex Criminals — Prime Video’s series adaptation of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s acclaimed Image Comics title — and join the project as an executive producer, Amazon confirmed Monday at its upfront presentation in New York.
The eight-episode series is co-created by Emily V. Gordon, Kumail Nanjiani, and Tze Chun, with Nanjiani also taking an on-screen role. Imogen Poots stars as Suze, a woman who discovers she can stop time during sex, and John Reynolds plays Jon, who shares the same ability. The couple, naturally, use their gift to rob banks.
Sex Criminals marks DaCosta’s second comic-to-television project in quick succession — she is also executive producing and holds a story credit, alongside Ozark’s Bill Dubuque, on Hulu’s pilot Southern Bastards.
DaCosta arrives carrying a résumé built on historic firsts. She became the first Black female director to open at No. 1 at the U.S. box office with Candyman in 2021, then directed The Marvels, making her both the youngest filmmaker and the first Black woman to helm a Marvel Studios feature. Her most recent film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, drew strong critical notices, and her 2025 feature Hedda — a stylized reimagining of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler starring Tessa Thompson — earned widespread acclaim.
The source material has its own long, complicated road to television. The comic debuted in September 2013 to immediate critical enthusiasm, earned two Eisner Award nominations in 2014, and ran for 31 issues across six volumes before concluding in 2020. In 2015, Fraction signed a deal with Universal Television to develop an adaptation — a project that stalled and never advanced. The current Prime Video version, ordered to series in January 2026, represents one of the first projects greenlit by Amazon MGM Studios global TV head Peter Friedlander.
Co-creator Tze Chun described the project as a decade-long personal obsession: “I’ve been a fan of Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals since the first issue hit the stands. This has been my dream project for over a decade, and co-creating this show with Emily and Kumail has been one of the creative highlights of my career.”
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Fraction and Zdarsky responded to the adaptation news by calling it “our dumb comic” while expressing enthusiasm for the creative team. The series is produced by Amazon MGM Studios alongside Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap and Gordon and Nanjiani’s Winter Coat Films.
