It’s been a minute since we were deep in the throes of Taika Waititi blockbuster fever, that heady time, post-Thor: Raganarok, when every studio was lining up to import Waititi’s distinctive brand of New Zealand quirk into their tired blockbuster franchises. (Turns out, the combined chilling effect of a Jojo Rabbit and then a Thor: Love And Thunder can do wonders for helping a fever to break.) But while studios no longer seem willing to throw Star Wars movies at Waititi with wild abandon, he has lined up a new comic book genre picture with a fair amount of name recognition behind it: Judge Dredd.
This is per THR, which reports that Waititi (whose most recent film was 2023’s Next Goal Wins) has been tapped to direct a new film based on the man who is the law, and who originally popped out of the pages of British comics magazine 2000AD back in the 1970s. (Famously, editors at the time made their new protagonist a sort of super-cop because then nobody could yell at them when he perpetrated the kinds of acts of gnarly violence that their adolescent readers craved.) Waititi will direct the film from a script by The Fall Guy and Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce, and the package (also executive produced by the heads of video game/comics company Rebellion Developments, which bought up the 2000AD rights in the mid-2000s) is currently being shopped around to Hollywood studios.
The Judge Dredd character—who lives in a post-apocalyptic future where “mega-cities” are protected/ruled over by “judges,” one-person judge, jury, and executioners whose politics range from quasi-fascist to just, well, fascist—has been adapted to film twice before. The first, starring Sylvester Stallone as the title character, is considered pretty bad even on the curve of movies where Rob Schneider plays the comic relief; the second, 2012’s Dredd—despite our own negative review—generally gets a lot more credit for its restraint, following Karl Urban’s Dredd as he assaults a single, highly fortified apartment building full of criminals. Another movie, Judge Dredd: Mega-City One was announced to be in development a few years back, under the auspices of director Duncan Jones, but has never seen the light of day.
The question here, basically, is whether Waititi’s brand of satirical strangeness, and the one that’s shot all through the Dredd comics, are fundamentally compatible. Press materials for the movie state that both Waititi and Pearce—long-time friends—grew up reading the Dredd comics, and it’s not like those books don’t have humor, albeit typically of the pitch-black sort. What they don’t have is whimsy, which feels like it’ll be harder to extract from the Waititi brand, but, hey, we’re always happy to be surprised. Meanwhile, THR notes that there are hopes that the film could “launch a Dredd universe that could be explored with additional movies and shows across various platforms,” which is not necessary defraying the “thing that seems like it should have happened back in 2018” of this all.
