Gael Garcia Bernal is 'Zorro Reborn' in Futurstic Reboot of the Masked Avenger

Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal will lead "Zorro Reborn", 20th Century Fox's futuristic reboot of the famed masked sword-wielding Spanish avenger. The B-movie style adaptation will surprisingly not be set in Mexico or California and will instead adopt a desolate & post-apocalyptic setting as a €˜one-man vigilante force bent on revenge seeking€™. Revenge on who or what or even what the catalyst was for Armageddon is anyone€™s guess but we are told the proposed movie would be part Sergio Leone Western/part No Country For Old Men. The rather desperate sounding tentpole comes from Lee Shipman and Brian McGreevy, the writers behind the Dracula re-imagining movie Harker at WB which Unknown director Jaume Collet-Serra is to helm; a King Arthur reboot titled Pendragon; and a re-imagining of The Count of Monte Cristo that would be set in the London underworld titled Once Upon A Time In Hell and it would seem to be they€™ve found a profitable career for themselves in putting a twisted spin on old favourites. Variety says no director is currently attached but there was one last Spring when Van Helsing and X-Men: First Class pre-vis supervisor Rpin Suwannath was attached to make his directorial debut. Those plans perhaps have changed. We should note this project is not to be confused with Sony's attempts to reboot their own Zorro franchise that has spawned two movies with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta Jones and were directed by Casino Royale and Green Lantern helmer Martin Campbell. Those films produced one fairly enjoyable swashbuckling adventurer before Sony dropped the ball for franchise by getting around to it€™s sequel, the tepid 2005 effort The Legend of Zorro, at least six years too late and by then nobody cared. Sony's new film, titled 'The Forging of Zorro" would be a much more serious 'Batman Begins' esque tale and is currently being written by Charlie€™s Angels producers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia. We suspected that film would be about the origins of Anthony Hopkins' masked avenger who preceded Banderas and would be in continuity with the other films. That film will soon be casting but Fox were quicker to get a leading man and get the ball moving... Bernal, who built up an awful lot of street cred for his role in auteur works not in the English-language (Amores Perros, The Science of Sleep, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Bad Education and more) has taken an out and out blockbuster paycheck for the first time (though he did staff in rom-com fluff Letters to Juliet and A Little Bit of Heaven for the cash). Shooting will take place this year once a director is found.