Sacha Baron Cohen to Conjure up Mandrake the Magician 

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Master of magic, spells and illusions, Mandrake the Magician will pull off his greatest trick and appear on a big screen right before your very eyes – with Sacha Baron Cohen set to don the top hat. 

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Etan Cohen, the Tropic Thunder writer who made his directorial debut with Get Hard, is attached to helm the project, which would be produced by Charles Roven’s Atlas Entertainment. 

The project is in early development with the script still to be written.Created as a newspaper comic strip by Lee Falk in 1934, Mandrake spun a yarn about a magician who could hypnotise his foes at great speed.

With his companion Lothar, an African strongman, he fought evildoers ranging from gangsters to masters of disguise to aliens. Mandrake also had a twin brother who used his power for evil instead of good.

Fans of a certain age will perhaps know him best from the animated series Defenders of the Earth, which teamed the hero with the Phantom, Flash Gordon and traditional Mandrake supporting character Lothar as a superhero group fighting against Ming the Merciless' attempts to overrun Earth.

There’s also the incredibly charming comic series by Dynamite which resurrected him for the 2013 series Kings Watch. 

Warner Bros. snapped up the rights in 2012, with the intention of going one step further than Disney and develop a full movie from Mandrakes bag of tricks.

Baldwin Entertainment and Hyde Park also attempted to bring a version of Mandrake to the big screen; developed in the late 2000s, had directors Chuck Russell and Mimi Leder and actors Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Hayden Christensen attached. 

Mandrake the Magician
The live action adaptation of Lee Falk's 1930's Newspaper strip about a masterful magician who could hypnotise his fo...
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