To many ’90s kids, the idea of a bunch of piloted robot vehicles coming together to form a giant humanoid robot will evoke images of “Might Morphin’ Power Rangers.” And why shouldn’t it? The show was a pop culture phenomenon in the states, based off of the Japanese “Super Sentai” series. But kids who grew up through the early ’80s will remember another form of combining robots, also based off an animated Japanese series, “Beast King GoLion.” Otherwise known in the West, as Voltron. It’s been a few years since we had a fresh Voltron interpretation but it appears we’ll not only be getting a movie, but a live-action one at that.
Because this film is very early in development, there’s not a lot that we know about it at the moment aside from a couple of key players. The film is being developed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, whose most recent project was the big-budget 2021 Netflix film “Red Notice” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. His previous work included “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” and 2018’s “Skyscraper,” also starring Johnson. Thurber is reportedly writing this adaptation alongside Ellen Shanman.
Thurber has apparently been shopping the project around for a while with reports of the live-action adaptation going back to 2022. Now it seems to have found a home with Amazon MGM with casting to begin in the next few months. There’s a few directions the film could go in whether it be trying to follow the characters from the original series and retell its story, or just using the concept of “Voltron” as a framework for original characters.
Over the last several decades the “Voltron” franchise mostly stayed in the same canonical universe across different iterations. The late ’90s gave us “Voltron: The Third Dimension,” a completely CG animated cartoon that took place five years after the original series. Nickelodeon gave us the very short lived “Voltron Force” in 2011 where the original Voltron pilots helped to train a series of new recruits. It was axed after one season. It would take DreamWorks Animation and Netflix to fully bring the series back to prominence in 2016 with “Voltron: Legendary Defender.”
This most recent installment (which is now six years old) was a fresh reboot in its own continuity, though it did still use iterations of the heroes and villains that had been staples of the franchise. We’ll have to see if Thurber goes that route or if he somehow manages to go back into the original continuity in some way. As we find out more information in the coming months we’ll keep you posted.
