It’s funny how things work in cycles sometimes. Long ago, in the heady days of 2018, Legendary announced it was making a live-action adaptation of the beloved mecha anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, and after three years of silence, the studio announced that Netflix and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts had boarded the project. Another three years of silence later (save for one apt image of a Gundam on fire), Legendary revealed that it had gone back to the drawing board, parting ways with both Netflix and Vogt-Roberts to rework a new project from writer-director Jim Mickle.
Now, Netflix might be back on board, although not in the way it was previously.
Deadline reports that the streamer has been tapped by Legendary to purportedly distribute Mickle’s Gundam movie, the first live-action movie take on the franchise since the 1999 TV movie misfire G-Saviour. Although Deadline says the plot of the film is under wraps, the film—set to star Madame Web‘s Sydney Sweeney and Street Fighter‘s Noah Centineo—was reported by THR to purportedly be based on a star-crossed romance between the two, who find themselves falling in love despite being on opposing sides of an interstellar conflict.
There’s every chance that the live-action film, like many entries in the anime franchise, could be set in its own unique timeline of Gundam continuity rather than the “Universal Century” timeline that houses some of the franchise’s main shows, including the 1979 original. But fans of the series will no doubt see parallels between that star-crossed description and the loose premise of the beloved mid-’90s OVA The 08th MS Team, which revolved around the burgeoning romance between Earth Federation mobile suit pilot Shiro Amada and the Zeon pilot Aina Sahalin at the height of the Universal Century’s infamous One Year War.
Whatever the film ends up being, by the time it actually makes it to theaters, there could be another full-circle moment involved behind the scenes. Netflix is, of course, currently in the process of potentially acquiring Warner Bros. in a major consolidation of Hollywood powers—with Warner currently being home to a major distribution deal with Legendary for franchises like Godzilla and Dune, while Legendary seeks to potentially sign a new distribution deal with Paramount… which is in the process of heavily contesting Netflix’s attempted merger so it could buy Warner instead.
It’s a small world, isn’t it?
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