On Thursday at the 2018 Anime Expo, a live-action Gundam movie was announced to be in the works. According to the AnimeNewsNetwork, the reveal was introduced by Sunrise President and CEO Yasuo Miyakawa at the Sunrise anime expo panel. Sunrise will be partnering with Legendary Entertainment to release the first ever live adaptation movie of the beloved series. During the event, a teaser video noting that “co-production has begun” was shared with the audience. A picture of the teaser was captured and shared via gundam.info
Sunrise’s partnership with Legendary Entertainment is a brilliant move considering the latter’s extensive experience with bringing giant robots to life. Given the commercial success of both Pacific Rim and its sequel, Legendary seems to know get mech movies.
While very little was introduced aside from the teaser reveal, according to Gizmodo, one other bit of additional info released during the Anime Expo was a brief synopsis of the movie premise.
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.
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Hopefully, the storyline and setting are designed to be as close to the source material as possible. Seeing how awful the live-action adaptation of Dragonball Z, The Last Airbender, and every single video game movie has been, it’s hard to imagine that Hollywood execs would be foolish enough to make the same mistake yet again in 2018. If you alienate the fans, you alienate yourself from money. This really isn’t a hard concept to understand and yet, it’s astounding how often history repeats itself. Let’s pray that this time, Hollywood has finally learned their lesson.
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