A Fistful of Dollars' TV Series In The Works

[Lee A Stewart]

The 1964 Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars is being adapted into a television series. According to Deadline, Mark Gordon Pictures has acquired the rights to both A Fistful of Dollars and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, a 1961 samurai epic from which the former borrowed its plot. Game of Thrones writer Brian Cogman is in talks to pen the series for the small screen.

A Fistful of Dollars gave Clint Eastwood his breakthrough role as “The Man With No Name,” a character who would later appear in For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. The movie follows the unnamed stranger as he arrives in the town of San Miguel, where two local smuggler families fight to gain control of the town. The Man With No Name uses his cunning and wit to trick the families into destroying one another.

A Fistful of Dollars has been described as an “unofficial” remake of Yojimbo, and not just in the way The Lion King is an unofficial remake of Hamlet. Rather, A Fistful of Dollars is so similar to Yojimbo in story structure that Japanese production house Toho filed a lawsuit, eventually settling out of court. However, the series in development will “pull from this source material for an original, contemporary retelling of the story.”

The new Western project comes out of Mark Gordon Pictures’ pre-existing deal with eOne. No other specific details have been released yet, but a TV series based on a classic Clint Eastwood movie is bound to be popular, even if Eastwood has nothing to do with it.

https://screencrush.com/a-fistful-of-dollars-tv-series/