Zeb Wells, the writer of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man through 2024, is working on a new Buck Rogers film script for Legendary.
TheWrap reports Wells, who previously worked on Marvel Zombies, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Deadpool & Wolverine, is the latest writer to work on a draft for the film, which is development at Legendary.
Wells is specifically writing a script that adapts Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. novella. The novella was the first story that introduced Buck Rogers as a World War I veteran and Pennsylvania coal miner who ends up in a suspended-animation state after being exposed to radioactive gas. He wakes up 500 years later in 2419 and discovers that North America is now dominated by Han airlords who rule from floating cities and enforce a feudal tyranny over scattered American tribes.
Rogers joins a resistance led by Wilma Deering and unifies the disparate tribes and takes the fight to the Han eventually retaking the city of Chicago and creating a foothold to retake the continent.
A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in March 1929. The character was also adapted into a newspaper comic strip, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. with Nowlan writing it and Dick Calkins drawing. The strip exploded in popularity. By 1930 it ran in over 300 newspapers, spawned a radio serial (1932–1947, one of the earliest sci-fi broadcasts), and inspired a 12-episode movie serial starring Buster Crabbe (1939).
Merchandise including ray guns, rocket ships, and Big Little Books made “Buck Rogers” a household name and helped cement pulp sci-fi in American pop culture.
The franchise continued in various forms: a short-lived 1950–1951 ABC TV series, a 1979–1981 NBC series with Gil Gerard and Erin Gray, and a 1980s comic revival by TSR.
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That could be interesting, just as long as it's not made for modern audiences.
I have such found memories of the late 70's show. I can visualize now going thru the TV Guide (back when we had print magazines) at grandmas house on Sunday for the weekly family dinner and looking thru the FALL Preview Guide and seeing BUCK ROGERS listed. As a kid in love with Scifi I had such high hopes that this and other SciFi shows around that same time would lead to a new SciFi push on TV. Sadly it wasn't until the SciFi network came into existence that we finally started to see more Science Fiction on the small screen.
I do hope this show ends up doing well. It would be great if maybe Gil Gerard could do a guest cameo in it. He is old at 82 but that's not too old to just do a quick cameo as a background character and it would be great fan service I think.