Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland will pen the script.


Jamie Foxx in 'Django Unchained'; Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro' Credit: Andrew Cooper/The Weinstein Company; Ronald Siemoneit/Sygma/Sygma via Getty

Sony is developing a Django and Zorro crossover film.

L.A. Confidential's Brian Helgeland will write the script based on Quentin Tarantino's comic book series.

Jamie Foxx, Anthony Hopkins, and Antonio Banderas previously played versions of the two characters.

It's starting to seem like the hottest trend in Hollywood is continuing the stories of memorable Quentin Tarantino characters, but without the iconic filmmaker behind the camera.

Later this year, Netflix will release David Fincher's The Adventures of Cliff Booth, and now comes news of Django Freeman returning and teaming up with the masked hero Zorro. Entertainment Weekly can confirm that Sony is in early development on the crossover film, which is adapted from Tarantino and Matt Wagner's 2014 comic series Django/Zorro.

Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential scribe Brian Helgeland is on board to write. And while Tarantino won't pen the script or direct, he has reportedly given his blessing to the project.

Tarantino won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the 2012 smash hit Django Unchained, a tribute to spaghetti Westerns that starred Jamie Foxx as Django, a slave-turned-bounty hunter who traveled the South in the mid-19th century on a mission to free his wife.

In the 2014 comic sequel, Django continued tracking villainous figures and eventually met dashing vigilante Don Diego de la Vega. In 1998's The Mask of Zorro, Anthony Hopkins played de la Vega, who then passed the Zorro torch on to Antonio Banderas' Alejandro Murrieta.

Banderas previously revealed that Tarantino briefly pitched him the idea, and the actor said "it would be fantastic and funny and crazy." Tarantino had developed an earlier version of Django and Zorro's adventures with standout comic Jerrod Carmichael.

“Quentin’s a lunatic who I love, and I’m happy that I got to spend the time,” Carmichael told GQ in 2022. “We saw exploitation flicks at the New Beverly, he read me scenes that never made it to his movies, that he had typed out, in his kitchen after making fresh-squeezed lemonade for me. It was really special. It’s actually an incredible, incredible script that came in from that Django/Zorro that I would love for Sony to figure out, but I realize the impossibility of it. But I still think we wrote a $500 million film.”

As Helgeland works to ensure that his Django and Zorro movie lives up to that lofty bar, Netflix is prepping for the release of The Adventures of Cliff Booth. With Tarantino holding firm on his self-imposed rule that he has to retire after directing 10 films, he oped to not make the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel his No. 10, and he instead let Fincher direct his script about Brad Pitt's stuntman character.

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