Sacha Baron Cohen often enjoys sporting a 'tache on screen, and now he's found another excuse to don face fuzz. He's attached to the latest incarnation of Mandrake The Magician.
Etan Cohen, who wrote Tropic Thunder, Men In Black 3 and more recently made his directorial debut with Get Hard, is on to direct this one, for Warner Bros., which in its most recent version, had a script by David and Janet Peoples and Puss In Boots' Tom Wheeler. We'd expect Cohen to take a pass himself, and to attempt to inject more humour into the story.
Originally created by Lee Falk for comic strips in 1934, Mandrake follows the titular illusionist, who boasted powerful hypnotic powers and a desire to right wrongs and battle evil. Along with African strongman sidekick Lothar, he took on aliens, gangsters and assorted villains. He even had a twin brother who had similar powers but – as with many fictional twins – used them to pull off dastardly deeds.
While Mandrake was more successfully brought back to goggle boxes with 1980s ‘toon Defenders Of The Earth, he’s had much less luck on the film front since he graced screens in 1939. Federico Fellini tried to make a movie of the character in 1960s and in the early '80s Michael Almereyda was hired by Embassy Pictures to crank out a draft. He duly obliged, only to emerge from three weeks of writing time to discover the company’s new regime had no interest in Mandrake.
More recently, Disney had the rights until Baldwin Entertainment and Hyde Park nabbed them, and came close in 2007 with a version that was set to star first Jonathan Rhys Meyers and then Hayden Christensen.
Warners swooped in back in 2012 and it has been in development since then with Charles Roven and Andy Horwitz producing. Cohen is already working up a new Cannonball Run for the studio, so the two projects will be duking it out for his attention.