Following the box-office and critical success of Thor:Ragnarok, Taika Waititi is currently loading up on upcoming projects with the enthusiasm of Jordan Peele after Get Out or Guillermo del Toro pretty much any time. And today Deadline reports that Waititi—whose TV adaptation of What We Do In The Shadows premieres later this month, who has a new movie called Jojo Rabbit coming out, and who has signed on to direct an episode of Disney +’s The Mandalorian—is throwing another project onto his ever-growing pile: a TV adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits for Baby Driver and House Of Cards production company MRC studios and Apple’s thus-far-mysterious streaming service.
Waititi has committed to writing and directing a pilot for a series based on Gilliam’s appealingly rambling 1981 fantasy-adventure, whose tone, once described by our own William Hughes as “a mixture of bitter cynicism, screwball comedy, and outright wonder,” is an ideal match for Waititi’s creative sensibilities. (If you haven’t seen Hunt For The Wilderpeople yet, please do.) Gilliam himself announced that he was working on a TV version of Time Bandits back in 2015, but given the two helmer’s respective batting averages in terms of actually finishing projects, maybe it’s for the best that he turned it over to Waititi.