Argentine film director Andy Muschietti is a busy guy. The hotly anticipated It adaptation is headed to theaters in just a couple months, and he already has a whole bunch of stuff on his plate. After clowns, though, what’s next? Robots, of course. Sony is looking to make a movie of the classic anime Robotech, and has tapped Muschietti as the man to lead the production, Deadline reports.
Robotech is one of the standard bearers of anime in American markets, with a story of pilots fighting off alien invasions with Robotech fighters, jets that can transform into robots. With 65 episodes and movies in Robotech and even more in the various anime that Harmony Gold edited together to make it, there’s no good way to cover all the complex stories that came together to make what we know as Robotech.
The first good anime-to-film adaptation?
Anime have been notoriously difficult to adapt to live action, with this year’s Ghost in the Shell being the poster girl for virtually every pitfall in the process. Many anime, like Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion, rely heavily on Japanese culture and Japanese cultural markers both visual and thematic. While source-series Macross has its share of those, the us-vs-aliens nature of the story and Robotech’s continued popularity in the U.S. give it more potential to make it to the big screen without falling into quite so many of those traps.
The bigger questions is Muschieti himself. The director has worked primarily on horror. He directed the horror film Mama and took over It when Cory Fukunaga left the project. He’s set to direct the first episode of Hulu’s Locke and Key, a horror-based comic book, too. While he was attached to direct an adaptation of the Shadow of the Colossus video game at one point, nothing has been said about that for a few years.
A project like Robotech is going to be a big-budget, CGI-intensive affair that dwarfs anything the director has worked on. The movie doesn’t have a writer or a script yet, but with Muschietti signed on to direct and his sister Barbara producing, we’re hoping to see the production start moving so we can figure out whether it has any potential or not.