While the character may not be as widely known as many of his costumed crime-fighting contemporaries, the Green Hornet has been around longer than Batman after making his first appearance in a 1936 radio broadcast. And because no property with even the slightest hint of name recognition is allowed to lay dormant for too long in modern Hollywood, Universal have announced that Britt Reid’s masked alter-ego will be getting the reboot treatment.
Despite the radio show running until 1952, with the Green Hornet starring in a string of 1940s serials, he didn’t become widely known until the TV show that lasted for 26 episodes between 1966 and 1967. However, that became more notable for introducing Bruce Lee to Western audiences as sidekick Kato more than anything else, and it wouldn’t be until 2011 that a feature-length adaptation arrived.
The movie was a strange beast, with a tone that veered all over the place and couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to be, which was probably to be expected when you had surrealist filmmaker Michel Gondry directing a $120 million superhero pic that starred Seth Rogen in the lead and was produced by one of the architects behind the Fast and Furious franchise.
It seems as though the reboot will be going down the buddy movie route and is currently going under the working title of The Green Hornet and Kato, but no other details are known at this point. We’ll get a better idea of the direction of the project once writers and a director become attached, but until then, we’ll just have to wait and see how Universal decide to approach the latest in a long line of reboots to roll off the industry’s production line.