The Magnificent Seven are set to ride again at Amazon Studios. Nic Pizzolatto‘s Western series at the streamer has morphed into a remake of the classic Western. The Hollywood Reporter has the news that the True Detective creator’s Western project has now become a TV remake of the classic western The Magnificent Seven, one of the many MGM properties that Amazon has recently acquired with their purchase of the venerable studio and announced intentions to develop, including RoboCop and Stargate.

Pizzolatto‘s original pitch was said to center around a former outlaw who’d left the criminal life behind him, allowing him to build a new life and a family, only for an old threat from his desperado days to resurface and threaten everything he has. The show apparently gained its new direction when Amazon executive Nick Pepper recalled that Pizzolatto had written the script for 2016’s Magnificent Seven remake, prompting a re-evaluation of the show’s premise. First released in 1960, John Sturges‘ The Magnificent Seven told the story of seven disparate gunslingers who are hired to protect a Mexican village from a band of marauding bandits. With a star-studded cast that included Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, the film was a success, and has since gone on to be considered one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It was itself a remake, of Akira Kurosawa‘s legendary samurai epic Seven Samurai, with the setting transposed from feudal Japan to the Wild West.

With its success, three sequels followed; 1966’s Return of the Seven, 1969’s Guns of the Magnificent Seven, and 1972’s The Magnificent Seven Ride!. Much later, the franchise was relaunched as a CBS TV series, starring Ron Perlman and Michael Biehn; it aired for two seasons on CBS, from 1998 to 2000. Director Antoine Fuqua remade the film in 2016, with a bevy of stars including Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, and Vincent D’Onofrio. The remake was a reasonable success at the box office, although less so with critics: Collider‘s Matt Goldberg deemed it “an action flick in western garb and not much else.”

Mark Johnson (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) will executive produce the series; he was attached to produce Pizzolatto‘s original concept, as well. Lawrence Mirisch, the son of late Hollywood producer Walter Mirisch, who produced the original Magnificent Seven as well as In the Heat of the Night and West Side Story, will also executive produce, as will Bruce Kaufman.

Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

via Collider