Veteran producer Robert Evans has signed on to produce a film based on 1970s ITV series UFO, the Gerry & Sylvia Anderson effort about a covert military group set up to try to fend off hostile aliens.

The live-action series ran for three TV seasons and was set in the (then) near-future of 1980, when aliens had started showing up on Earth and harvesting human bodies for organs. The main focus of resistance to them was by the organisation SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation - can't help thinking they invented the name first and then made up words to fit an acronym). Unusually, SHADO is based not in a remote mountain layer / space station but under a Hollywood studio, with its Commander Ed Straker also passing himself off as the studio chief.

This movie will be set in 2020 - once again the near-future - and will, it is hoped, prove the start of a franchise. Ryan Gaudet and Joseph Kanarek are writing the script for what could be an interesting film: unlike Anderson's marionette shows, Thunderbirds and the like, UFO dealt with adult topics like adultery and drug use as well as the aliens and so on. At the very least, the prospect of Hollywood types fighting aliens is amusing us massively.