Margot Robbie is developing a 'Tank Girl' movie reboot
Margot Robbie’s production company LuckyChap Entertainment has snapped up the movie rights to British cult comic Tank Girl, according to the character’s co-creator.
Alan Martin, who joined forces with Jamie Hewlett to pen the first Tank Girl comic in 1988, revealed on Twitter that LuckyChap has optioned the rights to the character from MGM.
The cult anti-hero was previously the subject of a critically reviled film adaptation in 1995, which featured Orange is the New Black actor Lori Petty in the title role.
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Martin wrote that the new movie is “several months into development” at Robbie’s company, which already has a comic book film on its slate in the shape of Birds of Prey, in which the 29-year-old actor reprises her Suicide Squad role as Harley Quinn.
Just heard that Margot Robbie's company have optioned rights from MGM to make a new Tank Girl movie - now several months into development. We haven't been contacted by any of the parties involved with the project, so not sure if there will be any input from the original creators. pic.twitter.com/7RxbV4qLFt
— Alan Martin (@AlienMartian23) September 9, 2019
He added: “We haven’t been contacted by any of the parties involved with the project, so not sure if there will be any input from the original creators.”
Tank Girl debuted in 1988 as part of the comics magazine Deadline, which was aimed squarely at the world of counterculture and had a decidedly post-punk ethos.
The title character is a bounty hunter who lives in a tank and is declared an outlaw with a multi-million dollar price on her head after a mistake that angers her shady employers.
She became popular as an emblem of empowerment politics and for her sexual liberation.
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In 2006, author and screenwriter Dominique Mainon described the film adaptation as “stridently feminist” in her book The Modern Amazons: Warrior Women On-Screen.
Although a financial flop at the time, the Tank Girl movie has become a cult classic and the comic strips have been reprinted in collections in countries all over the world.
All of this would seem to make the character an ideal fit for LuckyChap — a banner through which Robbie has focused on female-led stories.
The company’s movies to date include I, Tonya and Terminal and LuckyChap is also set to produce the Robbie-starring Barbie movie, written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
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She can currently be seen alongside Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, in which she plays 1960s icon Sharon Tate.
Her next film is Fox News drama Bombshell alongside Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, which is due to be released in the USA in December, with a UK release to follow in January 2020.
