You can’t keep a good IP down forever, but despite several attempts being mounted over the last two decades, nobody seemed to be able to crack the formula for successfully rebooting Zorro, until now.
For the first time since Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones conspired to kill their own franchise with the lackluster The Legend of Zorro – the woefully inferior follow-up to what’s easily one of the greatest superhero origin stories of the modern era – the masked vigilante is finally on his way back to screens.
Since the aforementioned duo last hit multiplexes, several filmmakers have tried to resurrect the sword-swinging outlaw, with Robert Rodriguez developing a female-fronted TV show that was ultimately cast onto the discard pile, while his longtime BFF Quentin Tarantino even had the ingenious idea of having Banderas’ iteration of the character cross paths with Jamie Foxx’s Django, which would have been spectacular to see happen.
Either way, the new Zorro has some decent pedigree on either side of the camera, with Netflix veteran Javier Quintas of Money Heist and Sky Rojo fame one of the directors, while the star of the streaming service’s longest-running original series ever Miguel Bernardeau will take top billing as Diego de la Vega.
Funnily enough, you wait almost 20 years for a Zorro reboot and you end up with two at once, given that Disney Plus also has its own spin in the works set to star Wilmer Valderrama, but that’s a long way away from coming to fruition, allowing its rival to gain the initial upper hand.