A long-gestating crossover movie pairing Django and Zorro is back in development at Sony Pictures, with Brian Helgeland hired to write the script, Variety reported.
Helgeland won an Academy Award for his screenplay for "L.A. Confidential" and will now take on a project that has been orbiting Hollywood for years. The untitled film draws from a 2014 comic series co-written by Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner, though the movie is expected to tell a new story rather than adapt the comics directly.
The premise brings together Django, the bounty hunter Jamie Foxx played in Tarantino's 2012 "Django Unchained," and Zorro, the masked vigilante portrayed by Antonio Banderas in 2005's "The Legend of Zorro" and Anthony Hopkins in the 1998 original. Neither Foxx nor Banderas has signed on, but Banderas has previously confirmed Tarantino approached him directly.
"He talked to me, I think on the Oscar night when I was nominated for 'Pain and Glory,'" Banderas said in 2022. "He just came up to me and I was like, 'In your hands? Yeah, man!' Because Quentin just has that nature to do those type of movies and give them quality."
Tarantino won't be directing. The filmmaker hasn't been behind the camera since 2019's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and has long said he plans to retire after completing his tenth film. At various points that tenth project was expected to be a drama called "The Movie Critic" with Brad Pitt, but that plan was scrapped.
The script's history is complicated. Tarantino previously courted comedian Jerrod Carmichael to write a draft, which was ultimately shelved. Carmichael told GQ in 2022 that he believed in the material: "It's actually an incredible, incredible script that came in from that Django/Zorro that I would love for Sony to figure out, but I realize the impossibility of it."
Helgeland now takes that baton. The project is in early development, and a director search has not publicly begun. Tarantino's next announced project is a West End play, a British farce called "The Popinjay Cavalier," set to debut in London in 2027.
