Thanks to Godzilla Vs. Kong stomping all over pandemic-era box office records, it’s a pretty good time to have worked on a MonsterVerse movie and to be actively pitching in Hollywood. Case in point: according to Variety, Netflix has tapped Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts to helm a live-action adaptation of the Gundam franchise, famous to nerds all over for being the anime that brought pathos to war stories about giant robots and the folks who pilot them.
Saga and Y: The Last Man writer Brian K. Vaughn will be on scripting duties, though there’s no word about what plot or era from the franchise — seriously, the universe’s timeline is all over the place — will provide the basis for the film. Our advice: Vogt-Roberts should throw everybody a curveball and put Turn-A Gundam on the big screen and piss everyone off. But, at the very least, he should try to get the same effects house that brought the RX-78-2 Gundam to life in Ready Player One, because that shit looked great.
But, ironically enough, this isn’t the first live-action Gundam property to make it to screens large or small: that honor goes to G-Saviour, an absolutely bizarre Canadian-Japanese co-production from 1999 that still causes the franchise’s fans (at least ones of a certain age) to twitch uncontrollably when they think about it. To say the very least, it’s aged poorly in the 20+ years since it came out, but if one’s in the proper mood for some incredibly campy sci-fi styled like Earth: Final Conflict or Andromeda and wouldn’t be out of place in syndication on the OG Sci-Fi channel, you might be able to wring some fun out of it.
Here’s a (slightly edited) clip from it, but you can definitely find the full film on YouTube if you want.
Nowhere to go but up, right? Anyway, there’s no word on when this Gundam project will hit, or if Vogt-Roberts is going to make it before he makes his Oscar Isaac-led Metal Gear Solid adaptation, but you can be sure we’ll bring you the news as soon as it breaks.