George Clooney is reviv­ing Buck Rogers for the small screen

Things have been qui­et for George Clooney as of late, as the biggest movie star in the world has tak­en some time out of the pub­lic eye. He appeared in Hail, Cae­sar! and Mon­ey Mon­ster in 2016, then went radio silent for a few years until he pre­miered his lat­est direc­to­r­i­al effort The Mid­night Sky to lit­tle fan­fare on Net­flix last month. The time to re-charge the ol’ A‑lister bat­ter­ies has come.

Now, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter reports that Clooney is cur­rent­ly in nego­ti­a­tions to join a pro­posed reboot of Buck Rogers, future-man of pulp paper­back noto­ri­ety. Though he has yet to sign on any dot­ted lines, con­flict­ing reports sug­gest that he may very well be in talks to star as well as direct the sci-fi blockbuster.

The Buck Rogers char­ac­ter enjoyed sub­stan­tial pop­u­lar­i­ty in the first half of the 20^th cen­tu­ry, cap­ti­vat­ing young­sters with his fan­tas­tic tales from the 25^th. The leg­end goes that Rogers was trapped in a mine­shaft dur­ing a cave-in and wound up in sus­pend­ed ani­ma­tion, awak­en­ing to the changed world of 2419. It was a fish-out-of-water genre sto­ry in the vein of John Carter, plac­ing a mod­ern man in the for­eign world of tomor­row instead of an Earth­ling on Mars.

But read­ers over the age of 20 may recall the cat­a­clysmic box-office fail­ure of the pro­posed John Carter movie, and real­ize that this could be anoth­er bomb in the mak­ing. The THR report lays out plans for a film set to spawn a series of films, which they believe could lead to an ani­mé series — the smell of hubris is in the air.

That said, it has his­tor­i­cal­ly been a bad bet to wager against Clooney, one of the last box-office guar­an­tees we have left. Though that could be chang­ing; his super­fi­cial­ly sim­i­lar Tomor­row­land flopped in 2015, a pos­si­ble por­tent of events to come. For the time being, may we all con­tent our­selves with the fan­ta­sy of a space-suit­ed Clooney fight­ing some big CGI aliens.