Disney Is Bringing Back Inspector Gadget In live-action film

Disney is continuing its mining of old properties for live-action films as the studio has begun development on a new adaptation of the popular 1980s cartoon Inspector Gadget.
The film is being produced by Dan Lin and Jonathan Eirich, the team behind this year’s box office smash Aladdin and is being scripted by Saturday Night Live writers Mikey Day and Streeter Seidell.

The cartoon followed the adventures of its wacky protagonist, a bionic detective who has access to an array of gadgets in his body, only to struggle to command control of them as he bumbles his way through every case. His frequent nemesis was the mysterious Dr. Claw and the evil organization M.A.D. while being assisted by his niece Penny and the family dog Brain. The cartoon was clearly a spoof of both Inspector Clouseau and James Bond.

Thanks to its success, the series sparked numerous spin-offs and continuations, the most recent of which included a CGI-animated series on Netflix that ran for four seasons from 2015-2018.
This will mark Disney’s third live-action adaptation of the character, with the studio producing a theatrical adaptation in 1999 with Matthew Broderick in the lead role and was a box office success but a critical failure. The studio followed it up with a direct-to-video sequel Inspector Gadget 2.

The Inspector Gadget property is primarily known for its time as a popular animated series in the 1980s, and in recent years it returned to those animated roots for a revival show on Netflix. But Inspector Gadget has also gotten some time on the big screen, and now word’s come in that Disney intends to give it the live-action film treatment again.

With two decades having passed since Disney delivered the first Inspector Gadget movie, it’ll be interesting to see how this reboot will compare to what’s come before. The hiring of two Saturday Night Live writers makes it abundantly clear that the comedic tone will be kept intact, but will they stick close to the original source material or take the character and his supporting cast in a radically different direction? We’ll have to wait and see, and as with so many projects, it’s possible other writers will later be brought aboard to polish or even overhaul the story.