With Disney in the process of putting together their reboot of The Lone Ranger and Summit having picked up Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers, Fox is apparently starting to feel the need to revive another swashbuckling franchise of their own. Zorro’s last appearance on the big screen was actually a lot more recent than either of those characters, with Antonio Banderas starring in The Mask of Zorro back in 2005. Now they’re aiming to bring the pulp hero back in a new way with a project called Zorro Reborn. The weird thing is that they intend to replace the western setting and adventurous tone with a dark and gritty post-apocalyptic future instead. Yep, this sounds like a GREAT idea.

According to the L.A. Times, Zorro Reborn already has a director in the form of Rpin Suwannath, a special effects guy who served as pre-visualization supervisor on the X-Men movies, The Chronicles of Narnia series and Serenity. The script was written by Lee Shipman and Brian McGreevy, who also penned a reboot of Dracula for Warner Brothers. Their re-envisioning apparently turns Zorro into a “one-man vigilante force bent on revenge”, and is influenced by both Sergio Leone and No Country for Old Men. Antonio Banderas will not obviously not be reprising his role this time around, and instead they are looking for a talented young actor to carry this potential new franchise.

As silly as it all sounds, it could probably still make for a decent movie… if it wasn’t called Zorro, that is. They seem to be straying so far from the original concept that it clearly should just become something completely different. Unfortunately, with name recognition being so important nowadays, they won’t avoid attaching it to something familiar. Were you a fan of the last few Zorro films? Are you interested in a darker, futuristic take on Zorro or will this eliminate all of the things that have made the character endure after all these years?