Legendary Entertainment announces plans to produce the first-ever live-action feature film based on Sunrise’s wildly popular Gundam franchise.
The announcement came yesterday at Anime Expo 2018, which sees Legendary co-producing the live-action feature film version of Gundam, based on Sunrise’s massively popular Mecha anime and science-fiction media franchise.
The billion dollar property was created in 1979 and has spawned a multi-platform universe encompassing televised anime, manga, animated films, video games, plastic models, toys, and novels among other media. Gundam continues to dominate master toy licensee Bandai Namco’s earnings almost forty years after its inception.
The original Gundam series is set in the Universal Century, an era in which humanity’s growing population has led people to emigrate to space colonies. Eventually, the people living in the colonies seek their autonomy, and launch a war of independence against the people living on Earth. Through the tragedies and discord arising from this human conflict, not only the maturation of the main character, but also the intentions of enemies and the surrounding people are sensitively depicted. The battles in the story, in which the characters pilot robots known as mobile suits, are wildly popular.
The story for the live-action version of Gundam is being kept under wraps.
The project will be overseen by Cale Boyter on behalf of Legendary with the Sunrise creative team.
Legendary currently has three films in various phases of production including Skyscraper, coming to theaters on July 13; and both Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and the live-action, Detective Pikachu films both in post-production, with Godzilla vs. Kong in prep.
