‘Red Notice’ Director Rawson Marshall Thurber to Make ‘Voltron’ Live-Action Movie
A bidding war is now underway to produce the adaptation of the anime series.
Netflix's 'Voltron: Legendary Defender.'
When there is a director with as many potential projects on their to-do list as ‘Red Notice’s Rawson Marshall Thurber, you do begin to wonder whether they’ve given up sleeping or have somehow cracked cloning to complete all the movies and TV shows they’ve lined up.
Thurber has just added to his list, with word via The Hollywood Reporter that he’ll co-write and direct a live-action adaptation of classic anime series ‘Voltron’.
Potted history time! ‘Voltron’ was based on the Japanese sci-fi series ‘Beast King GoLion’ and ‘Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV’. American production World Events edited and dubbed the series as a syndicated show, titling it ‘Voltron: Defender of the Universe’, which ran in the mid-1980s. The premise focused on five young pilots in a battalion named the Robot Lions, which are vehicles that merge to form a mega robot known as Voltron and take on a variety of enemies.
The show in animated form has already been rebooted twice, once for the NickToon channel in 2011, while the current version is on Netflix.
It's a compelling concept (one that has been referenced and parodied endlessly since its heyday) and a live action version has been in development at different terms since the early 2000s.
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 writers Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer. DreamWorks at one point tried to craft an animated feature.
'Red Notice' director Rawson Marshall Thurber.
Thurber would work on the script with Ellen Shanman, who has a variety of screenplays in development at different studios.
The biggest question for this new movie is where it might end up: Warner Bros., Universal and Amazon are among the studios and streamers competing to pick up the package, which has producers Todd Lieberman and David Hoberman on board alongside Bob Koplar, the head of rights owners World Events Productions.
Surprisingly, one big company apparently not looking to take this one is Netflix, even given its pre-existing connection to both ‘Voltron’ and Thurber via the ever-expanding ‘Red Notice’ franchise.
After the first ‘Notice’ crime caper (which starred Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds) hit big for the streaming service, it moved to quickly order two more installments which may shoot back-to-back to accommodate the stars’ busy schedules. That would seem to be the priority for the writer/director now.
Though there is also the recently-announced plan for Thurber to kick off a ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ TV series in the hopes of sparking a franchise based on the cult roleplaying game. When he’ll get everything made is anyone’s guess at this point – perhaps he’s planning to hand off one or two movies/shows to other people?
Should ‘Voltron’ come together swiftly, we can likely expect the ‘Red Notice’ sequels to take priority, but don’t count out giant robot action too soon.
