Quentin Tarantino is still gearing up for his yet-to-be-revealed 10th and final film, but it doesn’t seem like he’ll be going quietly into that good night. Besides writing the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood spinoff The Adventures of Cliff Booth that David Fincher is now directing, he’ll be making his debut as a playwright with The Popinjay Cavalier early next year. And now, Deadline is reporting that another Tarantino film is getting a spinoff.
Tarantino’s divisive 2012 spaghetti Western tribute Django Unchained will return with a sequel called Django/Zorro, where the slave-turned-bounty hunter originally played by Jaime Foxx meets the masked vigilante created by Johnston McCulley. While it might seem like a random pairing, Django/Zorro was originally a 2014 comic book miniseries in which, seven years after the events of the film, Django meets an aging Zorro. The two become friends, and Django takes a job as Zorro’s bodyguard. The duo then works to free enslaved indigenous people in the American Southwest. Django himself even dons Zorro’s mask during the series.
Tarantino teamed up with Grendel creator Matt Wagner to write the 2014 seven-issue series, which was drawn by late Spanish comic artist Esteve Polls. As for the film, its script will be helmed by Academy Award-winning Mystic River screenwriter Brian Helgeland. It’s unclear if Tarantino will be involved at all, though Deadline reports that the project has his blessing. Also unclear is if Foxx will return as Django, though it’d be hard to imagine anyone else in the role.
The report also says that, instead of adapting the story from the comics, Helgeland is “scripting a new story that follows on from the comic series,” which sounds like it’s a sequel to the comic series.
This would be a rather strange choice as few have probably read the comic and Zorro was already pretty old in it. (The comic also concluded with Django saying he never saw Zorro again.)
Personally, I’d hope they’d position them more as contemporaries, which would allow the film to put Antonio Banderas back in Zorro’s mask one more time, as he and Foxx are just seven years apart in age. This was apparently what Tarantino wanted too, as Banderas told USA Today back in 2022 that the director once approached him at the Oscars about playing Zorro again alongside Foxx as Django. Banderas said his response to Tarantino was, “In your hands? Yeah, man!” Though it remains to be seen if Banderas would be interested in Django/Zorro in someone else’s hands as the director of the film has yet to be announced (but most definitely won’t be Tarantino).
