Negotiation’s Over: A ‘Judge Dredd’ TV Show Is Happening

Last year, Karl Urban — who played Judge Dredd in 2012’s Dredd — revealed that more Dredd could be coming, but he didn’t know if it would be a feature film, TV series, or something else, and he didn’t know if he’d be in it. Today, via an exclusive from Entertainment Weekly, we have an answer to both questions: TV series and probably no Karl Urban.

The character will return in a live-action TV show called Judge Dredd: Mega City One and will be “set in a future where the East Coast of the U.S. has become a crowded and crime-ridden megalopolis.” Wait, you mean it isn’t already Don’t tell Baltimore.

The series follows an ensemble of Judges, and no actors have been cast yet, nor has a network or streaming platform been settled on. The TV adaptation was announced just in time for the upcoming 40th anniversary of Judge Dredd’s first appearance in the British sci-fi comic 2000 AD. The character was created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra as a satire of American ’70s revenge flicks and militarized policing (which seems oddly prescient).

The executive producers of Judge Dredd: Mega City One are Mark Stern (who developed Battlestar Galactica) and Dredd executive producers Stuart Ford, Jason Kingsley, and Chris Kingsley. Stern told Entertainment Weekly, “This is one of those seminal sci-fi properties that seems to only become and more relevant with age. Not only is it a rich world with biting social commentary, but it’s also fun as hell!” The Kingsley brothers added a thank you to “the legions of fans who have kept up pressure on social media” for more Dredd. So if you were tweeting “Gimme more Dredd, f*ck-o” at them once a day, um, thanks