Ever since his career exploded, Quentin Tarantino has had this pesky habit of promising projects that never materialized. He’s talked about making a Vega brothers movie, about the characters played by John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. He’s talked about making a Bond movie and a Star Trek movie. As of last fall, he was still threatening a third Kill Bill.
And then there was that time, in 2019, he floated a movie with comic Jerrod Carmichael. It would be an adaptation of DC/Vertigo comic Django/Zorro, which would find the gunslinger teaming up with an aging Don Diego de la Vega, better known as Zorro. Tarantino first talked it up in 2014, two years after Django Unchained, and it would have been a sequel set several years later. Jamie Foxx presumably would return. It wasn’t clear what Carmichael would be doing, but now we know he would have been Tarantino’s co-screenwriter.
Anyway, that’s no longer happening. But they tried. “Quentin’s a lunatic who I love, and I’m happy that I got to spend the time,” Carmichael told GQ (as caught by The AV Club). “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.”
But, Carmichael says, that’s society’s loss. “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,” he said. “But I still think we wrote a $500 million film.”
Since their collaboration was first announced, Carmichael’s life has changed dramatically. The star and co-creator of the dearly departed sitcom The Carmichael Show has come at as gay, had a hit Netflix stand-up special, and even uses a picture of him with Taylor Swift as his Grindr profile pic. But maybe someone, some day can give us the Django-Zorro mash-up he swears up and down is great.
(Via GQ and The AV Club)