Sony Plans a Global Franchise For Robotech as Movie Moves Forward
Sony Pictures has just announced that they have secured the big screen rights for Robotech with, in their words, “the intention of moving quickly toward production of a future global franchise”! This is great news geeks! For those of you that can remember the anime series, you will have serious feelings of nostalgia, epic robot wars and just plain space-battle awesomeness. The movie’s been in various stages of development for quite some time.
A sprawling sci-fi epic, Robotech takes place at a time when Earth has developed giant robots from the technology on an alien spacecraft that crashed on a South Pacific isle. Mankind is forced to use the technology to fend off three successive waves of alien invasions. The first invasion concerns a battle with a race of giant warriors who seek to retrieve their flagship’s energy source known as “protoculture,” and the planet’s survival ends up in the hands of two young pilots.
Immortals and 300 franchise producers Gianni Nunnari and Mark Canton are developing Robotech with Michael Gordon (300, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra) set to provide the screenplay. This team will “bring their modern sensibility to the tentpole, reintroducing today’s audiences to the Robotech universe.” The project will be overseen at Sony Pictures by Doug Belgrad, Michael De Luca, and Matthew Milam. Frank Agrama of Harmony Gold, which is the original intellectual property rights holder, will executive produce with Michael Gordon and Jehan Agrama.
There is one concern though, and that is that the market is already saturated with big space robot war movies. Transformers? Pacific Rim? We fear this movie has come at the wrong time, and run the risk of being a complete flop.
