Channing Tatum as a patriotic Communist in Hail, Caesar!

Channing Tatum’s slow development from hard-dancing Step Up eye candy to weird media auteur has been a beautiful thing to watch, giving rise to the confident sexuality of the Magic Mike movies and the self-indulgent mayhem of the 21 Jump Street films. Now C-Tates’ weird tastes have found another outlet, with Deadline reporting that his Free Association production studio has started development on a fake ’80s Romanian cop show called Iron Fisting.


Produced along with A24—the studio that had a hand in such triumphs of the weird as Spring Breakers, The Lobster, and Daniel Radcliffe: Farting Speedboat Corpse—the show will present itself as a Miami Vice-style cop show filmed in Communist Romania. Featuring dubbed American voices—with Tatum rumored to be doing at least a bit of voiceover work—over shots of Old World detectives, the show will see its heroes “seek to protect Communism and comrades from the evils of Capitalism.”

The series is being executive produced by Brian Gatewood and Alex Tanaka, the team that created the short-lived chimp-doctor sitcom Animal Practice for NBC. Casting has yet to begin, although Free Association has released some suitably Iron Curtain-esque key art of what the show might end up looking like: