Quentin Tarantino has a long list of unmade projects, among those a crossover between Django Unchained and Zorro, simply titled Django/Zorro – and here’s what happened to it. Quentin Tarantino has earned a place in film history thanks to his mastery of writing dialogues, his narrative and visual style, and his generous doses of violence and blood in every one of his movies, which have also made him one of the most controversial filmmakers. Tarantino has been around long enough to have a list of unmade projects, of which some would have had some interesting combinations of his work with other characters.
Tarantino’s career as a filmmaker began in 1992 with the crime movie Reservoir Dogs, through which the audience got a good taste of what he has to offer as a director and storyteller, but his big break arrived two years later with another crime movie: Pulp Fiction. This one had the particularity of being told in a non-linear style, with different segments that in chronological order tell a full story with different protagonists and their own issues. Since then, Tarantino has explored different genres in his movies, such as martial arts with both Kill Bill movies, slasher with Death Proof, and even some alternate versions of historical events with Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Tarantino has famously stated he will only make 10 movies before retiring, so there’s always a lot of anticipation and speculation around his projects, though many of them have ended up in development hell or Tarantino chose other projects over them. Among the many unmade Tarantino projects is a movie that would have brought together two different yet similar worlds: that of Zorro and the lead of Tarantino’s Western Django Unchained, all this based on the crossover comic book Django/Zorro by Tarantino and Matt Wagner. Django/Zorro spent years in limbo without any updates on the project, and it has now been confirmed to not be happening anymore.
Django/Zorro was published in 2015 and is the first comic book sequel to a Tarantino movie. In 2019, Tarantino revealed his plans to bring Django/Zorro to the big screen as well as what the story would be about, sharing that it takes place many years after the events of Django Unchained, with Django (Jamie Foxx) now operating in the west. Django continues working as a bounty hunter, which has earned him some enemies and has put a warrant on him, but he can still help sustain his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), as they settle down. Django’s missions and journeys lead him to meet Don Diego de la Vega a.k.a. Zorro, and they end up joining forces to free the local indigenous people from slavery. Also in 2019, Tarantino picked Jerrod Carmichael to co-write a movie adaptation of Django/Zorro, while Jamie Foxx expressed interest in reprising the role and having Antonio Banderas return as Zorro, but there were no updates on the project after that.
In June 2022, in an interview with GQ, Carmichael shared that Django/Zorro is not happening, and while he didn’t give exact details on why, he said he and Tarantino wrote “a $500 million film” and he realized “the impossibility of it”. Also in June 2022, Antonio Banderas spoke about meeting Tarantino in 2020 and the director telling him about Django/Zorro, which Banderas found to be “fantastic and funny and crazy”. Quentin Tarantino is working on what would be his tenth and supposedly final movie (as both Kill Bill movies are counted as one), but Django/Zorro won’t be it. While it would have been interesting to see the dynamic between Django and Zorro, it’s not exactly a necessary sequel or story, and it would be best to have a brand new, original Quentin Tarantino story as his final movie than a sequel/crossover.