It looks like the rush to make more giant freakin fightin robot movies isn’t over. Warner Bros. is getting serious about making a movie based on Robotech. HR reports that they’ve gone out and hired Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to begin writing it. The duo is probably best know for their work on TV’s Smallville, where they’ve been building geek cred for years. They also had some part in writing Spider-Man 2, a bullet point which is cancelled out by the fact that they’re to blame for The Mummy 3.
Still, there are fairly high-profile writers, a sign that they’re willing to invest in actually getting this done. There was another Robotech script, written by Lawrence Kasdan, but it sounds like they’re either ditching it and going with whatever Gough and Millar come up with, or hedging their bets and picking between the two. I haven’t read it, but give me Kasdan, the guy responsible for writing Empire Strikes Back. This seems like it’d be right up his alley.
Robotech could easily end up having a Star Wars style feel to it. The anime franchise which spawned the sprawling science fiction franchise it has become, is about a world in which Earth develops giant robotic fighting machines to pilot in battle against alien invaders. There’s movie worthy material in here. It’s much more serious and plausible than some of the other giant mech fighting franchises currently in parallel development. Voltron for instance is a somewhat similar premise but it’s more silly fantasy while Robotech is hard-edged, science fiction space opera. Robotech could work, if they pick the right script.
