Voltron is heading to Amazon.
The streamer is in negotiations to pick up the live-action take on the 1980s anime, with Red Notice filmmaker Rawson Marshall Thurber attached to direct the feature.
Thurber also came up with the story and will co-write the script with Ellen Shanman. Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman are on board to produce with Bob Koplar, the head of World Events Productions, the company that controls the Voltron property.
The package hit the town in March, attracting multiple offers and interest from studios and streamers alike.
Voltron is based on the Japanese sci-fi series Beast King GoLion and Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV. World Events edited and dubbed the series as a syndicated show, titling it Voltron: Defender of the Universe, that ran in the mid-1980s. The premise centered 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.
The show became an instant hit and has maintained a cult following in the decades since. DVD sales were in the hundreds of thousands, and the show was rebooted for NickToon in 2011, then Netflix in 2016.
Hollywood has tried to launch a live-action Voltron movie since the early 2000s, to no avail. Mark Gordon and Pharrell Williams were part of a team that tried to mount a project in the mid-2000s, and later New Regency got involved. In the early 2010s, Relativity Media was developing a feature with Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer. DreamWorks at one point tried to develop an animated feature.
It is unclear if it would be Thurber’s next project. Red Notice, released in November, stands as the biggest Netflix original movie of all time, according to the streamer, which said it racked up 364 million hours of viewing in its first month. Thurber is writing and planning to shoot back-to-back sequels, but those are still in development.
Thurber is repped by WME and Hansen Jacobson, while Shanman is repped by UTA, Kaplan/Perrone and Joan Vento-Hall. World Events is being repped by Artists First and Frankfurt Kurnit.
Source: Hollywood
