Red Notice director sparks bidding war for live-action Voltron movie

Voltron’s back, baby! Everyone’s very favorite robot action franchise, period—and that sound you just heard was our colleague Sam Barsanti’s head exploding, by the by—has apparently been swept up in a Hollywood bidding war, as Red Notice and Dodgeball director Rawson Thurber is facing competitive bids from Warner Bros., Universal, Amazon, and more for a new live-action movie set in the universe of space robots that combine into other, larger space robots.

In terms of his bona fides as an action director, Thurber is, well…the director of Dodgeball. Sure, he’s made a series of action blockbusters in recent years—most notably Red Notice and Skyscraper—but his qualifications for the job largely stem from the fact that he and Dwayne Johnson seemed to get along well enough in the wake of Central Intelligence, and have kept on working together since, come hell or low Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Certainly, nothing in Thurber’s filmography screams “giants robots who are also lions, because god knows giant robots weren’t dangerous enough.” Meanwhile, it’s not at all clear why Voltron, of all projects, has engendered this sort of bidding war in the first place. The franchise has largely sat fallow since its last TV show, Voltron: Legendary Defender, ended its eight-season run on Netflix in 2018. And while that show was popular enough, within its niche of “nostalgic-flavored animated programming on a streaming service,” you may notice that no one has initiated a conversation with you lately with “So, which colored Voltron lion are you?” (Note: If someone has opened a conversation with you with that line, they may be Rawson Thurber.)

Thurber (who came up with the story and will co-write the script with Ellen Shanman) has apparently been shopping pitches and a teaser reel for the film around studios for the last two weeks, and, again: Must be a pretty good tease. (We’re imagining a single-page PowerPoint that just says “I have The Rock’s private cellphone number,” but that’s because we’re uncharitable and unkind people.)

[via THR]