Director Matthew Vaughn revealed that Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy cast a large shadow across his plans for a new adaptation of Flash Gordon.
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Vaughn, whose Kingsman: The Golden Circle opened this weekend, was reported in April 2015 to be in talks for the Fox film, but there’s been little public movement on the project since then. However, he explained Flash Gordon was made more daunting because of James Gunn’s blockbuster franchise.
“For me, the only problem with Flash Gordon is Guardians kind of stole what I would have liked to have done with it,” he told to Collider. “You’ve got Star Wars, you’ve got Guardians, so you’ve got to have your own space opera, but you have to find something that can survive among these two very, very great franchises.”
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Introduced in 1934, Flash Gordon is the hero of the popular comic strip by legendary cartoonist Alex Raymond. Created to compete with Buck Rogers, the space adventure followed polo player Flash Gordon and his companions Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov, who fly in a rocket ship to the planet Mongo in an attempt to stop its collision course with Earth. There they come into conflict with the planet’s ruler, Ming the Merciless.
Flash Gordon has been adapted numerous times over the decades, on radio, film and television. Most famously it served as the basis for a 1980 movie starring Sam Jones and Max von Sydow, and featuring a soundtrack by Queen.