Over the years there’s been a lot of talk of bringing the classic 1980s TV series Knight Rider to the big screen, but it’s never happened. Instead they attempted a television reboot in 2008, with Justin Bruening as the estranged son of David Hasselhoff’s character from the original and Val Kilmer as the voice of KITT, the super-advanced talking car. However that didn’t last very long.
Now The Weinstein Company, which owns the movie rights to Knight Rider, is having another go at a movie version, according to The LA Times. They’ve hired Brad Copeland to come up with the script. Copeland has both film and TV experience as a writer and producer on the likes of Arrested Development and the recent US version of The Inbetweeners, as well as coming up for the script for Wild Hogs.
There’s no news on the exact direction Copeland will be taking for the movie, although it’ll apparently be ‘a somewhat higher-budget, more action-oriented’ film. In the original series, David Hasselhoff starred as Michael Long, a police officer who was shot and left for dead while working on a case. Discovered by a mysterious millionaire named Wilton Knight, Long is nursed back to health and reborn as Michael Knight. The benefactor gives Michael with all sorts of tech to fight crime, the most valuable piece being the Knight Industries Two Thousand, a.k.a. KITT, a talking car.
Whether this new attempt to make a Knight Rider movie will actually come to fruition remains to be seen.