New Zealand-born actor-director Taika Waititi is riding high in the box-office charts at present with his lighthearted superhero adventure Thor: Ragnarok.

But the Jewish director isn’t resting on his laurels.  As well as mooted returns to the Marvel Universe with either a fourth Thor film or, perhaps more interestingly, a movie devoted to The Avengers’ ex-Soviet super-spy Black Widow, he has three intriguing properties lined up for 2018.

He’s set to return to the horror-mockumentary field with We’re Wolves, a spinoff starring the werewolves from vampire comedy What We Do In The Shadows, an animated biography of Michael Jackson’s chimp companion Bubbles and…probably most controversially…a comedy about Nazis.

Asked by Screen Daily about the Bubbles project he said “This film is not about Michael Jackson because that’s not a story for me to tell – or a story I’d be comfortable telling – it’s about a chimpanzee’s fascinating journey through the complex jungle of human life,”

Meanwhile, he spoke to Vice about his more Hitler-centric project:  “There's also a smaller film that I've written that I'm going to try to shoot next year. It's a Nazi comedy…I wrote it five years ago, and now it's weirdly perfect timing. Nazis are cool again.”

The totalitarian mass-murderers aren’t necessarily your first choice for a gag-packed comedy romp but Waititi has shown such a deft touch for extracting laughs from traditionally less comedic elements that we’ll be watching his forthcoming work with interest.