All the news comes together in story of Zombieland writers tackling Micronauts screenplay
Tying the morning’s reports together in one giant thematic bow, Hasbro and Paramount have hired Zombieland writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese to pen the screenplay for its big-screen adaptation of Micronauts, Hasbro's next bid for creating a Transformers-like franchise out of one of its decades-old toy properties. “If you’re going to play with your Micronauts, you should pick up your Transformers and put them away, please,” Hollywood’s mom says. “But we’re not done playing with them yet!” Hasbro replies. “And Jason Statham might be coming over!”
Anyway, as we were reminded yesterday, Micronauts has actually been in development since around 2009 as a J.J. Abrams production, though the hiring of Wernick and Reese—who are certainly having a busy day today—is the first forward motion on the project since then. Of course, there’s no set timeline just yet. Wernick and Reese have plenty on their limited-edition collector’s plate already, ever since Zombieland made them two of the most in-demand franchise writers in the business, leading to them penning the script for the upcoming G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation and the X-Men spinoff Deadpool, and most recently signing on to develop the genre movie version of Tourette syndrome, Cowboy Ninja Viking.
Anyway, for those unfamiliar with the short-lived Micronauts toy line (which itself was based on Japan’s Microman series), its major selling point was its characters’ tiny, removable, interchangeable parts, many of which no doubt remain lodged in the lower intestines of kids who grew up in the ’70s. It also asked you to imagine a world of microscopic warrior princes and robots who disguised themselves as ordinary action figures and faced off against alien invaders. Now imagine that you basically have to scrap most of those characters and that storyline, because Marvel Comics fleshed all that out and it isn’t involved in this film. But most importantly, imagine Transformers, only smaller—which is fitting, as many Transformers characters initially began life as Microman figures. See, we told you that everything tied together today. It’s the circle of branding, and it moves us all.