Kevin Smith is adapting 1980s cult favorite ‘Buckaroo Banzai’ for television

By Brad Jones May 17, 2016

kevin smith buckaroo banzai tv series mallrats 2 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Clerks director Kevin Smith has announced that his next project will be a television adaptation of a cult movie from the 1980s. The filmmaker is planning to bring the oddball action and comedy of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! to the small screen, more than 30 years after the original movie hit theaters.

Smith detailed the project on this week’s installment of his Hollywood Babble-On podcast, according to a report from Coming Soon. He went on to credit the film for inspiring much of his own work, describing it as “very off-center” and “one of (his) favorite movies in the world.”

Released in 1984, Buckaroo Banzai starred the likes of Peter Weller, John Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum in an outlandish sci-fi adventure. The film struggled to compete with Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at the multiplex, and was ultimately deemed to be a box office bomb.

However, the film found a sizable audience on home video and emerged as a cult favorite among certain circles. This led to an attempt by Fox to reboot the property on television as Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries, but that project stalled.

Smith indicated that he intends to follow the plot of the movie fairly closely over the course of the show’s first season, while the second would be based on Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League — a fictional sequel that’s mentioned in the credits of the 1984 film.

The director also suggested an intriguing way of paying homage to the original via some inspired casting. Smith revealed that he wants to transplant Paul Weller from his role as protagonist to that of the villainous Hanoi Xan, the unseen nemesis of Buckaroo and his Hong Kong Cavaliers.

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Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

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