Warner Bros. Options Mandrake the Magician For Potential Movie Franchise

It looks like another old geek property will possibly be making its way to the big screen soon; Mandrake the Magician just got optioned by Warner Brothers, with the hopes to begin a new movie franchise for them. For those of you unaware, Mandrake was an old comic strip character created in 1934 by Lee Falk, the same man who created The Phantom. Mandrake was a magician who used his powers of hypnosis to fight crime, wearing the classical magician get up of top hat and cape. He even had an high tech lair called Xanadu. (Think Fortress of Solitude meets the Batcave) Though not technically super heroes, both Mandrake and the Phantom were predecessors to Superman and Batman by several years, and many consider them to be the first super heroes.

The last several years has seen the property go through several stages of development, with Disney involved at one point, and people like Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Hayden Christiansen attached to star. Director Chuck Russell (The Mask) was attached to direct as well a few years back, but all of these attempts fell through. Now that Warners is involved, they are hoping they can re-invent Mandrake in much the same way they re-invented Sherlock Holmes with great success. Nice to see that the box office failure of John Carter hasn’t scared all the studios away from things that happen to be old.

Maybe one day they can do a team up movie with Mandrake, The Phantom and Flash Gordon like the old 80’s cartoon Defenders of the Earth. Anyone else remember this cheesy show with the awesomely bad theme song, or am I the only one?