Sony Hires Helgeland for Django/Zorro Film

Sony Pictures is advancing development on a film adaptation titled Django/Zorro, hiring Academy Award-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland to pen a new story based on a 2014 comic book series co-written by Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner.

The seven-issue Dynamite Entertainment comic, published between 2014 and 2015, serves as an official sequel to Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained. In the story, set several years after the movie's events, Django Freeman, the former slave turned bounty hunter originally played by Jamie Foxx, travels the American Southwest. He encounters Diego de la Vega, the aging Zorro, and becomes his bodyguard. The pair unite to free local indigenous people from brutal servitude, with Django learning from the swordsman much as he did from his mentor King Schultz in the film.

Deadline reports that Tarantino, who directed Django Unchained, will not helm the project but has given it his blessing. The studio plans to continue from the comic's narrative while introducing fresh elements. Helgeland, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for L.A. Confidential, has credits including Mystic River, A Knight's Tale, Man on Fire and Payback.