Sci-Fi Film and Television Developments

Captain Blood

7/31/09 - Warner Brothers has set Michael and Peter Spierig to direct and John Brownlow to write a new sci-fi version of Captain Blood, the 1935 swashbuckler pirate classic that starred Errol Flynn as a wrongly imprisoned British doctor who escapes to become a pirate in the Caribbean, Variety reported.  Instead, the story is set in space.  After WB and producer Bill Gerber dusted off the library title and had Brownlow do a faithful first draft, they sought out pitches from filmmakers.  "At first, I felt like I was in that scene in The Player, where Buck Henry pitches the sequel to The Graduate," said Gerber. "But when I took a look at their animatic depiction of a pirate battle in space, it had such a distinctive visual look to it that I said, 'Great, I get it.'"  Gerber said that despite the radical period and venue switch, the film will be fairly faithful to a plot in which the doctor, Peter Blood, joins up with a French pirate (played in the original by Basil Rathbone), only to clash with the buccaneer when the woman he loves (Olivia de Havilland) is captured by the pirate skipper.

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