Hollywood’s comedy-reboot machine has spent a decade chasing the broad, four-quadrant laugh, so the most telling thing about Warner Bros’ revival of Get Smart is the kind of comedian it is chasing to lead it. Word that John Mulaney is eyeing the role of bumbling superspy Agent Maxwell Smart points to a studio betting that the franchise’s real engine is timing and deadpan control — not the pratfall-heavy spectacle that has defined most big-screen spy spoofs since.

As Deadline first reported, the four-time Emmy winner is in early talks to headline the reimagining, with Seth Grahame-Smith — the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t screenwriter — penning the script. The project sits at an embryonic stage: no director attached, no greenlight, no production start. Yet Mulaney’s name alone reframes what a modern Get Smart could sound like, shifting the center of gravity from action to delivery.

The property carries a specific pedigree. Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry in 1965, the original series built Don Adams’ Agent 86 into a Cold War icon of misplaced confidence — all shoe-phones, Cone of Silence, and “missed it by that much.” Steve Carell‘s 2008 feature reframed the character for the action-comedy era, leaning on set pieces and Dwayne Johnson-sized spectacle. Casting Mulaney gestures back toward the verbal, self-serious absurdity Adams perfected, the register in which a spy is funniest precisely because he believes he is competent.

For Mulaney, it would mark a deliberate move from stand-up specials and animation voice work into franchise leading-man territory, a lane rarely extended to alt-comedy figures. For Warner, it fits a broader industry reflex: mining recognizable mid-century IP to de-risk original comedy in a theatrical market wary of untested premises. A known title plus a distinctive comic voice is the hedge; the question is whether specificity scales to four quadrants.

The timing tracks with a wider retreat from original studio comedy, where pre-1970 television brands — familiar to older audiences, blank slates to younger ones — have become a favored safety net. Grahame-Smith, who made his name splicing genre onto familiar material in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, is a pointed choice for a spoof that has always lived one deadpan line away from collapse.

Whether Mulaney ultimately says yes may decide if Agent 86’s shoe-phone rings again — or whether Get Smart joins the long roster of reboots that stay, permanently, in development.

Tags: casting, Dwayne Johnson, John Mulaney, Get Smart, reboot, Seth Grahame-Smith