Buck Rogers Reboot in the Works at Legendary

In a movie that might remind some of other elders of Hollywood getting rebooted like Tarzan, [...]

By Spencer Perry

In a movie that might remind some of other elders of Hollywood getting rebooted like Tarzan, TheWrap reports that Legendary has nabbed the rights to classic character Buck Rogers. The studio behind Godzilla vs Kong, Dune, and Jurassic World is hoping to modernize the character for today's audiences with a huge push. According to the outlet they're developing not only a "blockbuster film" but a "prestige television series" and an "anime-style animated series." They further compare these multi-tiered plans for the franchise to a previously announced adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower, just for reference about how much money they intend to throw behind it.

Buck Rogers first appeared in the magazine "Amazing Stories" in 1928, created by Philip Francis Nowlan, but would go on to become a popular character thanks to the syndicated comic strip that arrived the next year. Radio shows, film serials, and television series followed in the decades since, but the character was quickly eclipsed by some of his imitators like Flash Gordon (which directly inspired Star Wars).

For those unfamiliar, the Buck Rogers story was one of a man that went down into a mine in 1928 and pulled a Rip Van Winkle, waking up five hundred years in the future and finding himself in the midst of a future war. The character would later fly off into the stars, popularizing the idea of space travel

According to the outlet, Transformers producer Don Murphy will shepherd the project to the big screen. Mary Parent and Cale Boyter of Legendary are overseeing the project for the studio with Cory Kaplan co-producing via Angry Films.

Though it's fallen off the radar by modern standards, Buck Rogers was enough of a staple in pop culture for decades that it was able to influence and appear in a number of surprising places. Perhaps the most well known parody of the character is the Daffy Duck cartoon from Looney Tunes, Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. Matt Groening and David X. Cohen's Futurama was also greatly influenced by Buck Rogers in a variety of ways. Furthermore Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was influenced by Buck Rogers after E.T. is inspired to finally "phone home" after reading a comic strip featuring the character. Even in the real world, the SpaceX line of rockets that take off and land vertically were directly inspired by the way space crafts work in the series.

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