Drone Mania Sparks Blue Thunder Remake

While there were so many cool movies that came out in the summer of ’82, ’83 was a good genre summer as well. The big boy of the season was of course Return of the Jedi, but there was also WarGames and Blue Thunder (both directed by John Badham of Saturday Night Fever fame).

While I’m not surprised to learn that Blue Thunder’s in the works to be remade, what isn’t these days?, it’s interesting to note what’s sparking the interest in Blue Thunder: Drones.

If you haven’t seen Blue Thunder, it’s about a state of the art police helicopter, and it starred Roy Schieder. (Dan O’Bannon, the late screenwriter of Alien, also penned the script.) It was a sleek, black chopper, similar to Batman’s flying vehicle in The Dark Knight Rises, and the movie was so popular in its time, it even spawned a TV rip-off, Airwolf.

In the new model Blue Thunder, the copter will be a drone, and it will be controlled on the ground by the main protagonist. We think it’s safe to assume that drones should continue to be in the news for a long time to come, and it could be interesting to see Blue Thunder with a drone twist.