Live-Action ‘Voltron’ Coming to Amazon From Director Rawson Marshall Thurber

After an intense bidding war between several high-profile production companies including  Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Pictures, it was ultimately Amazon Studios who emerged victorious in the fight for rights to produce a live-action adaptation of the anime Voltron.

Sweetening the pot is the fact that Red Notice director Rawson Marshall Thurber is already attached to direct the film, Todd Lieberman, David Hoberman, and Bob Koplar all to produce, and Ellen Shanman to co-write the screenplay with Thurber.

Voltron is a sci-fi mecha action-adventure series that was first conceived as an adaptation of Japanese super robot anime shows Beast King GoLion and Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV before premiering on NBC in 1984 as Voltron: Defender of the Universe. The show has had multiple different iterations since then, including Nicktoons’ Voltron Force and Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender, but in essence, every version revolves around a giant Super Robot known as “Voltron,” and also tends to follow the space explorers who pilot the big-time bot.

The series was an instant hit, its popularity spawning everything from comic books to Lego sets to video games. It is no surprise, then, that the show has accumulated a legion of fans from all over the world, and has even counted established actors like Steven Yeun, Lily Rabe, and Bex Taylor-Klaus among its vocal cast.

In fact, the series is so popular that there has long been a push to make it into a live-action film, with names like Mark Gordon, Pharrell Williams, Joshua Oppenheimer, and David Hayter attached to various attempts at the project throughout the aughts and 2010s. None of these efforts ever came to fruition, although there was a fan-made live-action short written and directed by Alex Albrecht entitled Voltron: The End and starring Timothy Omundson which was published on YouTube in 2011.

With this in mind, it’s clear that anticipation and excitement are building for Amazon and Thurber’s conceptualization of Vultron, so stay with us to keep up on date on the latest news and inside info regarding this electrifying upcoming project.