In case you were wondering, prolific filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (whose most recent projects include directing episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, as well as Netflix kids’ movie We Can Be Heroes) is still in the Zorro business. A few years back, he was working on a female-led, Zorro-inspired show for NBC that never happened — but now it’s resurfacing at the CW.
Rodriguez’s interest in the character of Zorro goes back a good while; in the mid-1990s — circa his Desperado/From Dusk Till Dawn/The Faculty era — he was initially attached to The Mark of Zorro starring Antonio Banderas, though the film was ultimately made by director Martin Campbell instead. In December 2020 came news of a potential Zorro TV series he was working on with Sofia Vergara at NBC; it was to follow an underground artist who “fights for social justice as a contemporary version of the mythical Zorro” and runs afoul of criminals in the process.
Now, as Deadline updates us, it’s looking like Rodriguez might finally get to make his Zorro show at the CW, since the network is now developing “a gender-swapped reimagining of the classic masked vigilante character.” It’s described as “a new iteration” of that NBC project (no Sofia Vergara in this one, for starters), and is about “a young Latinx woman seeking vengeance for her father’s murder joins a secret society and adopts the outlaw persona of Zorro.”
The show will be co-written by Rodriguez, Sean Tretta (Mayans M.C., 12 Monkeys, Hunters), and Rebecca Rodriguez, the latter being Robert Rodriguez’s sister who is also an experienced TV director, with credits on Doom Patrol, Snowpiecer, The Orville, and more. She will also direct the Zorro show, with Tretta showrunning, if the CW decides to add a different sort of masked vigilante to its stable of superhero-adjacent content.