From one re-imaging of a television event to another, it looks as if Sony has tapped Andy Muschietti to direct their upcoming live-action ‘Robotech‘ film. While Stephen King’s ‘It’ was already a live-action mini-series, this will be a new direction for the 1980s anime which has had ‘Robotech’ and ‘Macross fans’ glued to their seats for years. Barbara Muschietti, who usually works with Andy, Gianni Nunnari, and Mark Canton will all be on board to produce the project.
The original series recently found new life in an upcoming comic by Titan Comics which has used time travel to alter events from the past. The general gist of the series is that a giant alien battleship has crashed on Earth and humanity has used the technology from the ship create giant robots. When aliens start to attack our planet, the Earth bands together to fight them off using this adapted technology. In America, the original three series were combined as the 85-episode ‘Robotech’ series with a movie and a few spin-off films. This is all based on the ‘Macross’ universe which is much more extensive.
Now the problem we’ll face here is how unsuccessful the release of live-action anime films have been so far. ‘Ghost in the Shell‘ is reported to have a production budget of nearly $110 million and while they killed it with foreign sales, only pulled in $40 million domestically. One can only hope that studios are going to be able to make this work if they’re going to keep taking anime series and try to convert them to feature films.
With all of that in mind, I would truly appreciate a live-action ‘Robotech’ if it were to happen. Only, I feel that Sony is making a mistake here as it would likely work much better as an ongoing series instead of a single film or planned trilogy.
Are you looking forward to ‘Robotech’ hitting the big screen? Would you prefer this be a series, a film, or not happen at all? Share your thoughts below!
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
