The upcoming live action film Robotech from Sony has now brought on board Jason Fuchs, the Wonder Woman writer. Production for this movie will be started only after its director Andy Muschietti finishes the sequel of his successful horror film IT, titled IT: Chapter Two.
The original 1985 RobotechTV series was an 85 episode animation which merged three unrelated Japanese series into one and was dubbed into English. The story is about a future war between humans and aliens and it sees the humans reverse-engineering technologies from an alien spacecraft that had crashed on earth.
This enables the humans to arm themselves with robotic weapons. This series was later followed by several animated films and even a live action film was initiated in 2007Â featuring Tobey Maguire. Later James Wan got associated with the project before abandoning it in favour of Aquaman.
Lawrence Kasdan was later hired to pen a Robotech script, however, that version of the film saw several years and productions teams come and go, but, nothing materialized. Now as per Deadline, Jason Fuchs has taken upon himself to recreate Robotech in tendom with Muschietti.
The first big ticket project by Fuchs was writing the screenplay for Ice Age: Continental Drift. He wrote Pan which was a prequel to Peter Pan that went on to become a Black List script which became a movie directed by Joe Wright. Fuchs was also mentioned in the credits for Wonder Woman, an honor that he shared with Zack Snyder and Allan Heinberg.
The film has been a big hit and as per the latest reports had grossed over $816 million globally. He is now a much wanted writer who is associated with writing Luna Park for Doug Liman and Tom Cruise as well as a Warner Bros. project Minecraft: The Movie.
While we saw the Transformers franchise tank at the box-office this summer which was a film in the same genre, it is worth contemplating whether the time has run out for Robotech to be an appealing blockbuster prospect for Sony. If the iconic Transformers franchise has lost its power to drive people to watch their saga of outsized robots indulging in fierce battles then what are the odds for a film that is based on a little known animation series of the 1980s? The upcoming film Pacific Rim: Uprising is likely to deliver the verdict about the future of such mega robot genre in early 2018.
Despite having the credentials of IT director Andy Muschietti and one of the writers behind the blockbuster Wonder Woman, Robotech is not going to be an easy draw for Sony. They anyway don’t boast of an impressive record at box-office hits and have recently tasted failure with movies like Ghostbusters, Passengers and The Dark Tower.
