John Mulaney is circling the role of Maxwell Smart in a new Get Smart movie at Warner Bros.
The project remains at an early stage. Mulaney has not been formally announced as the star, no director is attached and no production or release date has been disclosed.
Seth Grahame-Smith is writing the screenplay. Andrew Lazar and Charles Roven are producing.
Warner is developing a reimagining, not announcing a sequel
That distinction is useful because Get Smart already has several screen lives behind it.
Current reporting describes the Warner Bros. project as a reimagining rather than a direct continuation of the 2008 Steve Carell film.
There is no confirmed return for Carell, Anne Hathaway or anyone else from that cast.
At the moment, the movie consists of a screenplay in development, two producers and a possible lead.
Maxwell Smart has been failing upward since 1965
Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created Get Smart during the height of the 1960s spy boom.
Don Adams starred as Maxwell Smart, an agent for CONTROL whose confidence was usually much more impressive than his actual judgment. Barbara Feldon's Agent 99 regularly provided the competence needed to keep their missions from collapsing completely.
The series ran for 138 episodes between 1965 and 1970 and won seven Emmys, including three awards for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Its joke was perfectly timed for the period: take the deadly seriousness of spy fiction and fill it with agents, gadgets and organizations that behave absurdly.
Steve Carell brought the premise back in 2008
Warner Bros. turned Get Smart into a theatrical feature in 2008 with Carell as Smart and Hathaway as Agent 99.
Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin and Terence Stamp joined them, with Peter Segal directing.
The movie opened to roughly $38 million domestically and eventually earned around $230 million worldwide against an estimated $80 million production budget.
A sequel was discussed afterward but never became a finished movie.
Mulaney would not simply be a Carell replacement
Mulaney's comic persona operates differently.
His stand-up often depends on exact phrasing, escalating anecdotes and the gap between articulate confidence and personal chaos. That last quality has obvious compatibility with Maxwell Smart.
Smart is funniest when he believes he has correctly read the room several seconds after everyone else has realized he has not.
Mulaney has spent much of his career in stand-up, television and voice work rather than leading large-scale action comedies. That makes the potential casting less conventional, but also less redundant.
The harder job is deciding what Get Smart should make fun of now
A spy parody needs a target.
The original series had Bond mania, Mission: Impossible and Cold War gadget culture. The 2008 film could borrow the visual language of early-21st-century action blockbusters.
A new version arrives in a stranger landscape.
Mission: Impossible has turned impossible stunts into part of its marketing identity. James Bond is between incarnations. Spy movies increasingly parody themselves before an outside comedy gets the chance.
Grahame-Smith therefore has to do more than reproduce shoe phones and CONTROL versus KAOS. The reboot needs to identify what modern espionage entertainment now takes seriously enough to deserve ridicule.
For now, John Mulaney is still only a possibility
Warner Bros. has not announced a completed deal with Mulaney.
There is no release date, supporting cast or director.
The project could still change substantially before production.
But if Mulaney ultimately becomes Maxwell Smart, the studio will at least have chosen a performer whose rhythm is different enough to justify trying the joke again.
