It's this era of photography that companies like Fujifilm are borrowing their designs from, and it's an obvious next step for Canon. Taking the popular AE-1 design and digitizing it would give them a recognizable entry in the mirrorless market (something it definitely doesn't have with the M series, which is widely ignored). It could play off the popularity of similarly-styled mirrorless cameras like the Fujifilm X100T or X-T1, and it would also open the door wide for more of Canon's legacy designs to follow suit, like the A-1 or the F-1.
Canon is rumored to be making a big push in the mirrorless market in 2016, and it will have a decent presence at CES, so who knows? Maybe the company is already working on a similar idea. What’s clear is that Canon needs to do something; the company's profits were down 21 percent in 2015. By making a retrofuture play at the mirrorless market, Canon can right the ship.