The lack of recent Transformers films has obviously left a big robot-sized hole in all our hearts. But fear not! Universal is just now developing a live-action Voltron film to fill that hole, and have even hired Watchmen scribe David Hayter to write the screenplay.
Voltron was a 1980s anime series that told the story of young pilots controlling massive Lion robots that form into the Voltron warrior and do battle on the planet Arus. Although the show only ran from 1984-85 in the States, Voltron was a bit of a cultural phenomenon in its own right, spawning a 1986 TV special Voltron: Fleet of Doom.
It later found a new incarnation as a computer-animated series Voltron: The Third Dimension, in 1998, and again as Voltron Force on Nickelodeon in 2011 (both series lasted only 26 episodes). The most recent small-screen version of the show, Voltron: Legendary Defender, premiered on Netflix this summer, with a second season set to hit in January 2017.
Universal is not the first to try and develop a Voltron live-action film. There was a projected movie being developed in 2005 with a script by Justin Marks (The Jungle Book), and as late as 2011 Relativity Media had announced that they were finally making the project. That never happened obviously, but it looks like this one might.
The Universal project is inherited from DreamWorks Animation, who also make the Netflix series. The hiring of David Hayter indicates that Universal hopes to make this into something relatively big-budget (as any live-action giant-robot movie would demand) and possibly into a franchise. Which makes sense: the original series and the new one both have cultural cache, and the potential for a long-running film franchise is massive. Universal needs a good one, too.
So, get excited, gigantic robot fans. You may get to see Voltron on the big screen someday.
