The creator of Miraculous is making a new Astro Boy cartoon

French computer-animated series Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir (or Miraculous, Les Aventures De Ladybug Et Chat Noir in the original Français) has quietly become an undeniable worldwide hit, with relatable teen superheroes and wacky villains powered by their negative emotions, and it sounds like creator Thomas Astruc and Method Animation are now getting rewarded for the efforts by being handed a big-name anime/manga franchise. According to Variety, they’ve been tapped to develop a new animated reboot of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy after what sounds like an intense fight to secure the rights before anyone else could.

The original manga/anime from the ‘50s and ‘60s is about a little robot boy in a sci-fi future who is built by a scientist named Doctor Tenma as a replacement for his dead son. Astro, with his rocket boots and machine gun butt and various other superpowers, eventually starts fighting bad guys and big robots. So it’s like Pinocchio in a way, if Geppetto built a baby Iron Man instead of a puppet boy… and if Iron Man had a machine gun in his butt.

Variety says Astruc will be directing 52 new half-hour Astro Boy episodes, with this new take on the character being “timelier” than the old one. Apparently, it will “address today’s hot-button issues, including the impact of the internet, social media, and the damages caused to the environment by humans.” That sort of thing feels very in-line with Miraculous, so it’ll be interesting to see Astro Boy having to deal with trolls who think people should stop trying to reboot Astro Boy (remember the 2009 movie?).

The Variety story doesn’t say how far off this is (we’d guess very) or where it might land when it’s finished (Miraculous originally aired on Nickelodeon in the U.S. before Disney swallowed it up, so it could go anywhere).