Spierig Brothers to Remake Captain Blood … in Space!

It sounds like the punchline to a joke, but it’s not: According to Variety, Warner Bros. has attached Australian siblings Michael and Peter Spierig to direct a space version of the classic 1935 swashbuckling pirate movie “Captain Blood”. They’ve also hired John Brownlow to pen the script, which will follow the plot of the original closely, except, er, you know, that whole space thing.

The 1935 original starred Errol Flynn as Peter Blood, a wrongly imprisoned British doctor who escapes to become a pirate in the Caribbean. He teams up with a French pirate name Levasseur (played by Basil Rathbone), but as is always the case, a woman from his past (played by Olivia De Havilland) eventually comes between them.

According to the trade, the space remake will be very faithful to the original plot, except the Caribbean will now become space, and instead of ships, they’ll have, well, spaceships. We are still promised pirate ship battles, though it’s a mystery if they’ll swap ray guns for swords. That would be kind of weird, but I suppose they could go the lightsaber route, or something more space-ish.

The Spierig brothers made their debut with their moderately budgeted 2003 zombie movie “Undead”, and have followed it up with their first Hollywood movie, the sci-fi/horror flick “Daybreakers”, which opens early next year.

Below: The Spierig Brothers on the set of “Daybreakers”.