Thor: Ragnarok took the established characters and lore of the MCU’s Thor films and turned it into a comedic, cosmic odyssey. It’s a bright, colorful adventure with a strapping, somewhat silly hero at its center. Surely a perfect proof of concept for its writer-director, Taika Waititi, to take a stab at the oldest cosmic adventurer in fiction: Flash Gordon. According to Deadline, Waititi is attached in some creative capacity for a new animated Flash Gordon movie at Disney/Fox.
Deadline has heard Waititi would write and direct the film, but his camp apparently just says he’s taking a “crack” at it. Waititi is finishing up Jojo Rabbit, his scripted adaptation of the Christine Leunens novel—a satire in which a young boy in Hitler’s army discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl from the Nazis. To make the premise all the weirder, one of the voices guiding the conflicted boy is his idiot imaginary friend Adolf Hitler, played by Waititi himself.
Flash Gordon is a pulp space opera comic strip first published in 1934, initially created to compete with Buck Rogers. The titular Gordon was an Earth sports hero who got picked up to go to outer space to join in the fight against the evil space dictator, Ming the Merciless. Flash Gordon became a movie serial beginning in 1936. After several television series, both animated and live-action, the saga got an infamous big screen, full-color adaptation in 1980 to try for some of that sweet Star Wars green. That movie won several Golden Raspberry awards despite having some delightful special effects and a rocking soundtrack album by Queen.
Another Flash Gordon has been in the cards for awhile now, with the likes of Kingsman‘s Matthew Vaughn among the names attached to direct. That was when it was gonna be a live-action movie. An animated film seems a very strong choice now, especially given how other action-comedy animated films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse have fared. Maybe Flash Gordon could have a spacey Incredibles aesthetic?
Even if it takes a hundred years, we’re hoping a Taika Waititi Flash Gordon animated series comes to our screens. And that Korg is in it for some reason.
Images: DeLaurentiis Pictures/Dynamite Comics
Kyle Anderson is the Editor at Large for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
