Other than Sin City, Robert Rodriguez has refrained from taking on someone else’s intellectual properties, instead focusing on original series like Spy Kids and his El Mariachi trilogy. The auteur is making an exception, though, for one of his favorite cartoons, Jonny Quest. In a new interview with /Film, Rodriguez commented on what it was that makes a Jonny Quest project so enticing:
There are just so few properties that are interesting. I’ve always wanted to do one because you learn a lot. Doing a studio project like that, you would learn something that you would bring back to something that you do on a smaller scale. You have a bigger budget than I would normally work with. So I was always looking for a franchise. I knew Dan Lin a long time. He did Lego Movie, he’s a producer, he did a movie with me called Shorts. Years and years ago he brought me Jonny Quest. I was like, ‘You know, I have my own series. I’m doing the Spy Kids movies.’ Once those played out, he came back again recently and said, ‘What about Jonny Quest?’ I’m still a huge Jonny Quest fan. My kids still watch Jonny Quest. They’re still so into it. I turned them onto it when they were little and now they’re 17, 18, and 12 but they still love it.
Rodriguez is also working on the live-action adaptation of the 1983 animated film Fire and Ice. He noted that both the script for that film and Jonny Quest would likely be done around the same time, so it’s up to the studio which gets greenlit first. As for the tone of Jonny Quest, Rodriguez says it will be less like Spy Kids, and more like a big-budget action-adventure film along the lines of Indiana Jones.
“Not a kids film; the Spy Kids were more like kids films,” he told /Film. “This would be like a real action-adventure film because that’s what the original series was like.”
