There are only so many modern comic-book heroes you can make movies out of before you have to start dipping a little deeper into the well. Spider-Man and Superman have already been rebooted, the X-Men are already doing time travel, and obviously, it’s physically impossible to make a movie about a female hero like Wonder Woman or the new Captain Marvel. So that only leaves old-timey characters nobody really has strong feelings about. Characters like Flash Gordon.
As revealed by The Hollywood Reporter, Fox has just picked up the rights to a movie adaptation of the 80-year-old hero with writers J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (who recently worked on the next Star Trek sequel). Apparently, producer John Davis has been fighting to get the Flash Gordon rights for more than a year, so Fox is presumably pretty confident in whatever he and his writers intend to do with it.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with the story of Flash (ah-ahhh!), the incredible theme song that Queen recorded for Universal’s 1980 movie version, which you can hear below, will tell you everything you need to know. But the short version is that he’s just a man with a man’s courage—nothing but a man—who gets sent to a crazy planet called Mongo, where he fights the evil Ming the Merciless. Also, he’s for every one of us, he stands for every one of us, and with a mighty hand he saves every man, every woman, and every child, because he’s a mighty Flash. Or something like that. The lyrics get pretty hard to follow for a bit.