It’s been a few months since we heard about long-delayed Flash Gordon reboot, which means it’s now time to hear about… another Flash Gordon reboot. After all, kids of all ages are just constantly screaming about Flash Gordon, a thing they are definitely aware of, so it makes perfect sense that Fox (and now Disney) would be extremely desperate to cash in on Flash Gordon fever. That previous attempt was coming from Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn, who would be producing the film, with Overlord director Julius Avery directing.
Now, Deadline says that Taika Waititi has been hired to “crack” an animated Flash Gordon movie, which presumably means that Disney and Fox want him to try and figure out how to make this idea appealing to anyone who wasn’t alive the last time Flash Gordon had a movie. Deadline says Waititi is possibly going to write and direct, but it’s “too early” to say for sure. Either way, he has an opening in his schedule after backing out of Bubbles, the animated Netflix movie about Michael Jackson’s life told from the perspective of his pet monkey. It’s unclear if the Vaughn/Avery Flash Gordon movie has been canned in favor of this or if both projects will live simultaneously, but it probably won’t matter as long as the Flash Gordon fans have at least one Flash Gordon to look forward to.
For those of us who aren’t Flash Gordon fans, Queen’s theme song for the 1980 movie is as good of an introduction as you could possibly hope for—and yes, side-stepping any actual description of the Flash Gordon character in favor of simply referencing the Queen song is a longstanding Newswire tradition here at The A.V. Club, to the point where one fresh-faced youngster managed to do it in one of the very first stories he wrote for this site over five years ago. We all got so old, huh? Anyway, here’s the song.