Taika Waititi to helm new Judge Dredd film

Taika Waititi is to direct a new Judge Dredd movie.

The Thor: Ragnarok filmmaker has been tapped to oversee a new picture featuring the popular British comic book character.

Drew Pearce - who has penned action movies such as The Fall Guy and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation - is set to write the script.

Insiders say that Waititi and Pearce are friends who both grew up with the books and have been trying to find a project to collaborate on for several years.

Dredd was created in the late 1970s by scribe John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra and debuted in the British weekly anthology comic 2000 AD.

He is a police officer in the bleak future metropolis of Mega-City One and is empowered to be judge, jury and executioner.

Dredd proved to be a hugely popular character, featuring in several more comic strips, video and board games, books and even postage stamps in the UK.

Over 100,000 comics and graphic novels featuring the character are said to have been sold.

A Hollywood movie about Dredd was made in 1995 with action legend Sylvester Stallone in the title role, but the film was critically panned.

The character returned to the big screen in 2012 for a more positively-received film with Karl Urban starring and a script by 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland.

Plot details are yet to be revealed but it is believed to take inspiration from the comics rather than previous movie adaptations - leaning into world-building and dark humour.

It is said to be a fun sci-fi blockbuster that is hoped to mark the launch of a Dredd universe that could be expanded with more films and shows on various platforms.

Taika has helmed two movies in the Thor franchise but revealed that he had "no interest" in working in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and only accepted the project because he was "poor".

The 49-year-old director told the Smartless podcast: "You know what? I had no interest in doing one of those films. It wasn't on my plan for my career as an auteur.

"But I was poor and I'd just had a second child, and I thought, 'You know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children.'"

Waititi added: "And Thor, let's face it – it was probably the least popular franchise. I never read Thor comics as a kid. That was the comic I'd pick up and be like 'Ugh'. And then I did some research on it, and I read one Thor comic or 18 pages, or however long they are."

Taika felt that Marvel reaching out to him suggested that they were unsure about what to do with Chris Hemsworth's god of thunder.

The Jojo Rabbit director explained: "I think there was no place left for them to go with that. I thought, 'Well, they've called me in, this is really the bottom of the barrel.'"