John Mulaney Circles Agent Maxwell Smart in Warner Bros.' 'Get Smart' Reboot
John Mulaney is in talks to play Agent Maxwell Smart in Warner Bros.' upcoming movie reboot of Get Smart, according to Variety. The project is still in very early stages, with no start date announced.
Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote 2025's Now You See Me: Now You Don't, is set to pen the screenplay. Andrew Lazar and Chuck Roven are producing. Both producers carry deep studio résumés: Roven's credits include the Dark Knight trilogy, while Lazar produced the 2008 Get Smart feature that starred Steve Carell.
That 2008 film, directed by Peter Segal and co-starring Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin and Terence Stamp, opened to $38 million and earned $230 million worldwide against an $80 million budget — a solid if unspectacular result for a Cold War comedy arriving two decades after the original series ended.
The property traces back to 1965, when Mel Brooks and Buck Henry co-created Get Smart as a satire of the spy genre then dominating television. The series ran for 138 episodes across five seasons, ending in 1970. Don Adams starred as the bumbling Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, with Barbara Feldon as Agent 99 and Edward Platt as the Chief of Control — the spy agency at the centre of the show's elaborate, gadget-driven send-ups.
For Mulaney, the role would mark a shift from his stand-up and television work toward a studio comedy lead. His most recent turn was as host of Netflix's Everybody's Live with John Mulaney, a 12-episode run that aired in 2025. He has a nine-show New York comedy tour, Mulaney Takes Manhattan, set to begin in January. His next film appearance is in David O. Russell's sports biopic Madden, where he plays Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts.
No other casting for the reboot has been confirmed. The deal for Mulaney is not yet closed.
Warner Bros. has been actively mining its library for revisitable properties, and Get Smart — with its built-in name recognition and a successful previous film adaptation — fits that pattern. How closely the new screenplay hews to the Brooks-Henry original, or to the 2008 Carell version, remains unknown at this stage.
