Taika Waititi’s ‘Flash Gordon’ Adaption Being Developed as Live-Action Film
Written by SOURCE on July 31, 2021
Taika Waititi’s upcoming adaption of Flash Gordon, which was initially developed as an animated film, is now scheduled to be a live-action movie.
Producer John Davis, whose latest film Jungle Cruise was released this weekend, revealed the news in a recent interview with Collider.
“Taika is writing it. It was a movie that was a huge influence on him growing up. It is one of his favorite movies,” Davis explained. “He initially said to me, ‘Let’s do it animated.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ Then we got into it and started developing it and he said, ‘No, let’s do it live-action.’ I said, ‘Even better.’”
The news arrives nearly two years after Disney tapped Waititi to take on the project back in 2019, which was previously attached to directors like Matthew Vaughn and Julius Avery.
“We’ve been through the development process, not the writing process, but he’s laid out in great detail the characters, the movie, the way in, what it’s about, the tone, all of that stuff, right? And I can’t wait,” Davis told Collider. “And we’ll wait for him. Hopefully, we’ll get… Look, he does a lot of movies, right? Believe it or not, he can do a couple of movies a year.”
Flash Gordon is based on the 1930s comic strip originally drawn by Alex Raymond, who created the character to compete with Buck Rogers, the already established adventure strip. Raymond’s strip follows Gordon, a handsome polo player and Yale graduate, and his companions Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarko.
The story begins with Earth threatened by a collision with the planet Mongo. Dr. Zarkov invents a rocket ship to fly into space in an attempt to stop the disaster. After recruiting Gordon and Arden, the team lands on the planet and halts the collision, coming into conflict with Ming the Merciless, Mongo’s evil ruler.
Flash Gordon last hit the silver screen in 1980 as a space opera film starring Sam J. Jones in the lead role and Max von Sydow as Emperor Min.
