Several months ago a rumour floated onto the internet that Sam Worthington was going to play Dan Dare: Pilot Of The Future in a film adaptation of the classic British comic books. At the time it wasn't clear quite how attached Worthington was (after all, following Avatar he has to be linked with all possible roles), or indeed whether the film was more than the hopeful pipe dream of Virgin Comics, which bought Dan Dare a few years ago with an eye to relaunching him first on the page before bringing him to the big screen, due to the fact there was no official studio involvement.
However now it's been revealed that it's all true, with Variety reporting that with Worthington attached to star, Warner Bros. is busy closing a deal to develop a feature version of Dan Dare. Although the character isn't that well known in the US, the studio still thinks its worth taking a shot on the British Buck Rogers, in the hope that like Iron Man, they can take a comparatively little known character and turn him into something a lot bigger.
When he first appeared in 1950, Dan Dare was a typical patriotic British hero, who spoke like he'd just stepped out of a war movie. At that point, the future he was piloting around in was the 1990s. Although those times have been and gone and we're still stuck on Earth, Dare was busy zooming around the solar system, fighting off evil, including the dastardly Mekon. In recent years, as with many comics, the series has taken on a slightly darker tone, with the world in disarray and Dare trying to sort things out.
There's no news on when Warner might get the film into cinemas, but it'll be interesting to see what direction they take character, as he could run the gamit from bright, colourful family escapist fare, through to dark, gritty sci-fi.