“Voltron” has long been a beloved anime property from the 1980s and like “Transformers,” “Gundam,” “Battle of The Planets,” and “Robotech,” is another sci-fi animated series heading towards the big screen with a high-profile feature film in the works. The Hollywood Reporter says that “Red Notice” director Rawson Marshall Thurber is set to helm and co-write a film with the pitch and teaser reel being sent out to multiple studios leading to a bidding war.
They add that Warner Bros., Universal, and Amazon are in the mix for the package deal, however, Netflix isn’t. The streaming giant is the home of Thurber’s “Red Notice” and the DreamWorks cartoon series “Voltron: Legendary Defender.”
“Voltron” focuses on “five young pilots in a battalion named the Robot Lions, which are vehicles that join together to form a mega-robot known as Voltron.”
Thurber developed the story and will co-write the film’s script with Ellen Shanman. This won’t be his only IP adaptation in the works as the filmmaker is also involved with the pilot of a “Dungeons & Dragons” series on the heels of a new film at Paramount that is starring Chris Pine (“Star Trek,” “Wonder Woman“).
The original show is based on the Japanese sci-fi series “Beast King GoLion” and “Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV” that was edited and dubbed by World Event as a syndicated show, “Voltron: Defender of the Universe,” that ran in the United States in the mid-1980s. It had been recently parodied in the last season of Adult Swim‘s massively popular satirical series “Rick & Morty” throwing it back into zeitgeist alongside the aforementioned Netflix series.
It’s unclear if anyone is attached to star or if that process won’t happen until the movie finds a studio home.