It’s hard to top playing Batman, but George Clooney may get a shot. The Oscar-winning actor, producer, and director is joining up with writer Brian K. Vaughan to make Buck Rogers, a limited series about the timeless, hugely impactful sci-fi character.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, while Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov are aboard the product strictly as producers at the moment, the show is being developed with an eye for Clooney to potentially star. Legendary (the company behind the upcoming Dune and Godzilla vs. Kong) got the rights to the franchise last year and at first envisioned it kicking off with a movie leading to TV adaptations. Now though, that’s flipped and franchise will begin with this Vaughan-penned “prestige” limited series which, if successful, could then become a movie and also an anime series.
Buck Rogers was created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the late 1920s and has lived across magazines, comics, radio shows, television, and movies ever since. He’s a blue collar worker and former soldier who is mistakenly preserved in time only to be resurrected several centuries later. Once awake, he finds himself in a strange future where he emerges as a hero. The modern movie take on Captain America is an obvious wink to the tale.
Clooney certainly has that from-another-generation heroism one would need to play the worldly, confident Rogers. And his latest movie, The Midnight Sky, seems to suggests a newfound adoration for sci-fi. That, plus the words of Vaughan, have us thinking this has winner written all over it — if, in fact, it happens.