From kung fu cops with half-human, half-dinosaur crime-fighting companions to treasure-hunting adventurers with T-Rexes as BFFs.

Swedish filmmaker David Sandberg, finest often known as the author, director and star of viral action-comedy quick “Kung Fury” a few renegade time-travelling martial arts legislation enforcer, is engaged on a brand new function movie. And for followers of his wildly vibrant cult debut — a preposterously OTT homage to 80s motion motion pictures that featured machine gun-toting Viking valkyries, a personality referred to as Triceracop and a high-kicking Adolf Hitler (aka “Kung Fuhrer”) — it doesn’t appear 1,000,000 miles away.

“Dragonlord,” at the moment in growth, is billed as a “fantasy punk” movie mixing motion, comedy and sci-fi.

The function is about in a world Sandberg describes as “like ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Mad Max, ‘Lord of the Rings’ and He-Man mashed into one, the place dinosaurs from the previous co-exist with robots from the longer term — and all the pieces in between.” There are huge gun, huge swords and, by the sound of it, an entire lot of loopy.

The story follows a personality often known as Dragonlord (to be performed by Sandberg), a treasure-obsessed hunter whose finest pal is a Tyrannosaurus Rex referred to as Blaze Falcon. Slightly than hunt for but extra treasure, nevertheless, Blaze simply needs to hang around and play video video games, however when he’s kidnapped by the evil Dreadmancer (assume He-Man’s archenemy Skeletor), Dragonlord should pull collectively an Avengers-like group of bonkers heroes to avoid wasting his dino buddy.

“It’s a extremely enjoyable, actually wealthy world with loads of humorous characters,” says Sandberg. “It’s tonally much like ‘Kung Fury’.”

Alongside Dreadmancer, the lineup of figures in “Dragonlord” consists of the Dread Riders (“just like the Stormtroopers of our world”), a tech man referred to as Quantum Cobra, Sword Lord (“who used to work for Dreadmancer however fell in love together with his unicorn so is now one of many good guys”), somebody referred to as Titanus whose title folks maintain announcing as “Tight Anus,” Budgie, who’s a “like a hen man who shits acid,” and plenty of extra. To date, so insane. And so related, at the least creatively and comedically, to “Kung Fury.”

“It’s such a loopy mishmash of stuff. There’s no film that I can consider that’s precisely prefer it,” says Sandberg. “However yeah, it’s a like He-Man combined with ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Mad Max’ and likewise ‘Ninja Turtles’… nevertheless it’s positively gonna really feel tremendous totally different, I feel, from something.”

The filmmaker says the “Dragonlord” script is at the moment being polished, with the casting course of set to start quickly and a shoot aimed for spring 2026. Not like “Kung Fury,” which was predominantly filmed towards a inexperienced display screen, “Dragonlord” can be shot utilizing digital manufacturing applied sciences, which he asserts give him vastly extra highly effective world-building instruments than he beforehand had at his disposal and, regardless of the epic scope of the undertaking, ought to maintain the funds down.

Your entire “Dragonlord” undertaking is being financed by Finnish entrepreneur Mikko Kodisoja, who made his fortune because the co-founder of Supercell, the gaming firm behind monster cellular hit “Conflict of Clans.” Sandberg says the 2 bonded over the concept “creating new, thrilling high-concept IPs for motion pictures,” with “Dragonlord” being the primary of a slate of tasks they’re constructing. Sandberg is now growing the movie at Kodisoja’s digital manufacturing facility in Finland.

Information of “Dragonlord” lands nearly 10 years to the day since “Kung Fury” first premiered on the 2015 Cannes Movie Pageant. Following the premiere, a feature-length observe up — once more to be directed by Sandberg — was introduced, and, over the continuing years, main names together with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michael Fassbender would be part of the solid. Regardless of the shoot wrapping in late 2019, authorized points involving the movie’s Chinese language financier would see post-production grind to a halt in 2020. 5 years on and after a number of lawsuits, the authorized points rumble on and the movie stays in limbo (though a recently-leaked 10-minute sizzle reel brought on a stir on-line).

Chatting with Selection earlier this month, Sandberg described how “heartbreaking” it had been to see his ardour undertaking stalled for therefore lengthy, and admitted that it had left him in a “deep melancholy.” However finally it led to him creating once more, with “Dragonlord” the end result. Due to Kodisoja fully-funding the function, this time round he doesn’t need to search for different financiers and even fear about pre-sales. The plan is to complete the movie after which introduce it to potential distributors.

In fact, there are nonetheless hopes that the authorized knots protecting “Kung Fury” tied down could be undone, and the response to the leaked sizzle present there’s nonetheless an enormous quantity of curiosity. However till then, at the least Sandberg has one other insane world — together with an acid-defecating birdman — to maintain him busy.