The film rights to "Y: The Last Man" have reverted back to co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, director Dan Trachtenberg confirms, bringing an end to the long-developing adaptation.

"I'm not sure Brian will ever want to do anything more with it," Trachtenberg tells Slashfilm, "and I'm not sure that he needs to."

Vaughan signaled in January to CBR News that a rights reversion was imminent, explaining, "It's my understanding that the rights to 'Y: The Last Man' will revert back to co-creator Pia Guerra and me for the first time in a decade if the planned New Line adaptation doesn't start shooting in the next few months, so I expect there will be some 'Y' news in 2014 either way."

Published from 2002 to 2008 by Vertigo, the Eisner Award-winning "Y: The Last Man" follows Yorick Brown, an amateur escape artist who, with his pet Capuchin monkey Ampersand, is the last survivor of a mysterious plague that killed every other male mammal on Earth. The two set off on a globe-spanning journey to reunite with Yorick's girlfriend, discover what wiped out the world's Y chromosomes and find out why they survived.

Although Trachtenberg, a commercials director, boarded the film in January 2013, it's been in development since at least 2007, with D.J. Caruso "loosely attached" as recently as August 2010. However, Caruso and New Line disagreed on the adaptation's format, with the director envisioning a trilogy and the studio reportedly wanting a single film. "Y" was revived in late 2012, reportedly as one of the studio's priorities.

Expressing sadness that his version of "Y" will never make it to the screen, Trachtenberg concedes in his statement to Slashfilm that, "Like everyone else who's a fan of the series I had always wished it either remain in its comic book form [...] or, if it must be made, a TV series would be the only thing that would suffice."

He also reveals "Y" would have been an adventure movie that "essentially" adapted the first two comics collections: "Taking inspiration from the original Star Wars (Episode 4) -- we wanted to tell a complete story ... but not the whole story. Hoping that, in success, we could get tell the rest of our serialized adventure. 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' was referenced a lot. 'Midnight Run' and 'Big Trouble in Little China' were referenced a lot. 'Willow' and 'Ladyhawke' I may have referenced a little too often ..."

Trachtenberg's next film is "Valencia," for J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions and Paramount Pictures.