21 Years After His Last Appearance, Zorro Returns — With a Twist

Don Diego de la Vega, also known as the masked vigilante Zorro, isn’t a character you see much anymore. (Specifically, it’s been 21 years since The Legend of Zorro, charmingly described on its Wikipedia page as a “swashbuckler” movie, was released in theaters.) And that’s too bad — in an era of extreme wealth inequality, a character who defends the poor and oppressed against the corrupt and greedy would be welcomed with open arms by much of the American public. But wait! Who’s that swinging through the open window on a silk curtain?

It’s Django/Zorro, a screenplay that Sony Pictures recently commissioned from Brian Helgeland, who was nominated for Oscars for his scripts for L.A. Confidential and Mystic River. (More recently, he wrote John Woo’s remake of his own The Killer, which was released to barely any fanfare on Peacock in 2024.)

This is another adaptation job for Helgeland: Aside from their respective origins in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained — this is the formerly enslaved bounty hunter Django, not the Italian cowboy who drags the coffin around — and in the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano, respectively, Django and Zorro first met in a comic book, also called Django/Zorro. That seven-issue Vertigo event series was co-written by Tarantino and comics creator Matt Wagner, best known for creating the Grendl and Mage series. (Spanish artist Esteve Polls provided the art.)

Django/Zorro was the first — and for a while, the only — official sequel to any Quentin Tarantino film. (It still technically is, given that that heinous Fortnite thing technically takes place between Kill Bill 1 and 2.) As a team, Django and Zorro make sense: They’re both literal social-justice warriors devoted to defending the downtrodden, and both have a bit of style to them as well. (One can imagine the two going hat shopping together.)

In the comic, Django agrees to serve as Zorro’s bodyguard on a mission to free a group of enslaved Indigenous people, developing a rapport with his California counterpart akin to Django’s relationship with Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in the original Django Unchained. Variety says that the movie version of Django/Zorro will consist of a new story featuring the same characters, but the general concept — punishing evildoers with a rogue-like flair — will presumably remain the same.

The screenplay itself has had a long, strange journey through Hollywood: Several drafts of the movie already exist, including one written by comedian Jerrod Carmichael, who told GQ back in 2022: “It’s actually an incredible, incredible script that came in from that, Django/Zorro, that I would love for Sony to figure out, but I realize the impossibility of it.”

Carmichael is presumably referring to the complicated tangle of rights issues surrounding the character of Zorro that has dogged creators for decades, even after The Curse of Capistrano entered the public domain in the ‘90s. In short, a company claiming to hold the Zorro copyright will sue anyone who tries to do anything with the character; the rights are broken down in a granular way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to produce a Zorro film without paying a licensing fee to Zorro Productions Inc. A lawsuit against Zorro Inc. in 2018 may have changed the character’s legal status, or Sony may have just agreed to pay a fee. (It’s got the money.)

Either way, swashbuckling is coming back into style.