Acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino had once famously remarked that he didn’t go to film schools, he went to films. The 59-year-old has several quirky movies which sometimes even alter historical events – like ‘Inglourious Basterds’, where he showed Adolf Hitler’s assassination, or ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’, where he scripted the movie to avoid Sharon Tate being murdered by Charles Manson and his gang of hippies.
One of the projects he was contemplating was a crossover involving Django, played by Jamie Foxx in ‘Django Unchained’, and Zorro, the masked vigilante who’s been memorably portrayed by Antonio Banderas. Reports surfaced in 2019 that Tarantino wanted to adapt his own crossover comic, which would see the freed slave and masked vigilante form a team.
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To that end, the director also brought comedian Jerrod Carmichael onboard and wanted Banderas, who performed in the ‘The Mask of Zorro’ in 1998, and ‘The Legend of Zorro’, in 2005.
Banderas, recently opened up to USA Today, remembering when the Palme d’Or winning director approached the actor to get him to star in the crossover.
“He talked to me, I think on the Oscar night [in 2020] when I was nominated for ‘Pain and Glory.’ We saw each other at one of those parties. He just came up to me and I was like, ‘In your hands? Yeah, man!’ Because Quentin just has that nature to do those type of movies and give them quality. Even if they are based on those types of B-movies of the ’60s and ’70s, he can take that material and do something really interesting”, the 61-year-old Spanish star noted.
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Banderas continued, “We’ve never worked together, but it would be great because of him, because of Jamie Foxx and because of (playing) Zorro again when he’s a little bit older. It would be fantastic and funny and crazy.”
However, COVID descended upon the world, and the project seems to be a casualty of the pandemic. Speaking to GQ, Charmichael confirmed that the ‘Django/Zorro’ crossover isn’t happening anymore but didn’t provide a specific reason.
He said, “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.”
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Tarantino has always been firm that his body of work will include ten movies, after which the director plans to retire from filmmaking. His next project would be his last, in that case, but Tarantino has branched out to writing and his novel ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ – which fleshes out the film’s plot – shows why his writing chops parallel his filmmaking skills.