The idea of Vin Diesel inheriting Telly Savalas’s iconic role as Lt. Theo Kojak fills us with both the idea of intriguing possibilities and the nagging image of Kojak saying “Who loves ya, baby?” while enjoying a lollipop as a car careers off a rooftop. Still the one-man movie machine remains committed to taking it on, and has writer Philip Gawthorne working on a new draft of the script.
Universal – which we imagine will indulge almost any whim of Vin’s these days given the potent box office for **Fast & Furious 7 **– is backing the project which at one point the actor (according to his Facebook page) wanted Ang Lee to direct. We’re not there by a long stretch, but development is continuing, with playwright and EastEnders/Casualty veteran Gawthorne scoring job after job in Hollywood. He’s already at work on the Cube remake for Lionsgate and has co-written medieval action spec World Breaker with William Eubank.
Kojak, which would adapt the cop show that ran between 1973 and 1978, is apparently now intended to be a character-based franchise, so don’t go thinking it’ll necessarily be a Fast clone. A previous draft of the script came from Bond regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, but there’s no word on when it might actually head into production.