Rawson Marshall Thurber is coming off Netflix’s much-watched Red Notice and heading into a whole new world of major franchises. Last month, he was hired to “creatively oversee” a Dungeons & Dragons movie that would complement the upcoming D&D movie (the one starring Chris Pine and so many other people). And now he’s part of the team joining together to form a live-action Voltron movie.
Thurber is set to direct and co-write the film, which The Hollywood Reporter says is currently the focus of a bidding war among six or seven movie studios and streaming platforms, including Amazon, Universal, and Warner Bros.
A Voltron movie has a long history of not happening. As THR notes, everybody from Pharrell Williams to DreamWorks has been involved in trying to get such a project off the ground over the last 20 years. The concept—five space pilots whose robot lions come together to fight evil as the mega-robot Voltron—comes from the Japanese series Beast King GoLion and Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV, episodes of which were dubbed and retitled Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and aired in the US in the ’80s. The series was rebooted twice, most recently as Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender in 2016 (pictured above).
This new potential movie has among its producers Bob Koplar, who runs World Events Productions, which owns the Voltron rights. Thurber would co-write the script with Ellen Shanman, who was hired to adapt Ken Liu’s The Hidden Girl, though there’s been no news on that film since 2018.
Thurber is a very busy fellow; along with the D&D show, he’s developing two Red Notice sequels that are supposed to film back to back. But with so many studios excited about this Voltron, maybe it’ll actually happen this time!
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