George Clooney could be heading into space again after it was announced that he had joined the team putting together a reboot of the classic science fiction series Buck Rogers.
The Hollywood Reporter writes that the project, written by Brian K Vaughan of Under the Dome, could be a “standout vehicle” for Clooney, who will be the series’ executive producer.
The character Buck Rogers is a war veteran who goes into a coma and wakes up in the 25th century. After the success of a film from the late 70s, a TV series starring Gil Gerard as the officer in the US Army Air Force , and Erin Gray.
Rogers first appeared in the 1920s before becoming a pillar of comics in the 1930s, with the first adaptations for radio, TV and cinema, all before the 1950s.
Clooney is in the race for awards for another post-apocalyptic sci-fi project under the guise of Netflix’s The Midnight Sky. He joined the project as an executive producer, alongside his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov, while Flint Dille – grandson of Buck Rogers’ original editor, John F Dille – will produce.
There were aborted attempts to revive the Rogers franchise with Frank Miller, the Sin City comic writer who became a filmmaker, announcing in 2008 that he was working on a film adaptation of the story, but never saw the light of day.
Earlier reports said the reboot would return to the character’s first appearance in the 1928 story, Armageddon 2419 AD, where Rogers is presented as a World War I soldier trapped by a collapse while investigating strange phenomena in an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania.
In the story, Rogers is exposed to radioactive gas and wakes up almost 500 years later, in the 25th century, and helps a resistance force try to retake the USA, which was taken over by a conquering force.
The original 1970s TV show was part of a streaming boom fueled by nostalgia during the pandemic. It is part of the programming of Forces TV, the commercial arm of the British Forces Broadcasting Service, a charity that provides TV and radio to members of the armed forces.