In what I think makes for a brilliant lateral move with his career, actor Tobey Maguire has set himself up with a new potential major genre franchise. The Spider-Man star will produce a big-screen Robotech movie for Warner Bros. and maybe -- maybe -- also take the starring role in the pic. Maguire Entertainment is the producing company that Tobey has and it will shepherd the movie's development along with Supercool Hollywood BigTime Productions, the company owned by Drew Crevello. They've already got a guy named Craig Zahler working on the screenplay.
"We are very excited to bring Robotech to the big screen," Maguire is quoted as saying in The Hollywood Reporter. "There is a rich mythology that will be a great foundation for a sophisticated, smart and entertaining film."
In the wake of the huge success of Paramount/DreamWorks' Transformers, a Robotech movie looks like a extremely viable movie franchise. It's got giant robots, it's got robot-on-robot battle action and it's based on a popular '80s cartoon that is well-known to both American and Japanese Gen-X'ers. The one thing that Robotech has over Transformers is more of a science fiction gist with its alien armadas and invasion forces.
The Robotech TV series seen stateside was cobbled together from a trio of Japanese anime shows. In a nutshell the story is about a league of human pilots that man giant mechas that the Earth has back-engineered from a crashed alien spaceship. Eventually another alien race, the Zentradi, come to Earth and a massive war erupts between these guys and humanity. The cartoon/anime blends soap opera interplay between the human (and alien) characters with scenes of mass destruction and battle and an epic storyline akin to World War II, with the action taking place both on Earth as well as in deep space. If Maguire decides to star in the film he'll likely take the role of Rick Hunter, one of the star pilots of the mechas. If Maguire is thinking of not donning the red and blue Spidey costume again then he's picked a great successor franchise to get involved with.
Don't forget that there's also a Voltron movie in development too. I also think that any day now an official announcement about Transformers 2 should be coming down the development pipeline.
