Archer just finished its seventh season on FX, ending its Los Angeles sojourn with a definitive bang. (You can read our review of the cliffhanger-heavy finale right here.) And while the show’s fate is currently up in the air—with ratings dropping every season for the last few years, and the seventh the lowest-rated the show’s ever had—producers Adam Reed and Matt Thompson are still hatching plans for the future.
That’s per a recent Daily Beast interview with Thompson, who says the show’s creative team has been moving up and down—phrasing—on the idea of a feature film version of the show, which would probably go into motion after Archer goes off the air. “It’s all up to whatever Adam [Reed] wants, to do, but he and I have definitely talked about it,” Thompson said, adding that the discussion about a movie comes up every few years. “We vacillate between if you do it, why are you doing the TV show? And should it be live-action, or should it be cartoon?”
If they do go the live-action route, though, Thompson already has his real-world Codename: Duchess picked out: “It’s Jon Hamm,” he said. “If Archer goes live-action, I do believe it will be Jon Hamm.” That presents something of a conundrum, in so far as H. Jon Benjamin’s vocal performance as the titular superspy is one of the lynchpins of the show, but apparently that’s also been discussed. “Maybe you could do it with Jon Benjamin’s voice coming out of him?” Thompson suggested—a pairing that Reed has previously referred to as an “H. Jon Hamm Benjamin hybrid.”
Hamm previously appeared on the show, playing a deranged sea base captain in the fourth-season finale. Physically, he’d be a dead ringer for the world’s most dangerous former secret agent, to the extent that there’s a Tumblr, “Sterling Archer Draper Pryce,” that mashes up Mad Men with quotes from the show.