Warner Bros. Names Director for 'Robotech'

Warner Bros. has tapped Nick Mathieu to helm the big budget, big screen adaptation of the venerable Robotech anime/cartoon franchise.  Put together by the late Carl Macek from three different anime series, Robotech was instrumental in stimulating American interest in anime, and in particular in developing a taste here for mecha-heavy science fiction sagas that feature piloted transforming robots and planes.

Warner Bros. has been developing a big screen, live-action adaptation of Robotech since 2007.  A number of writers have had a hand in trying to fashion a Robotech screenplay including Lawrence Kasdan.

As The Hollywood Reporter points out, "many writers have had a crack at Robotech, but this is the first time Warner Bros. has named a director."  Mathieu has yet to helm a feature film, but he has done lots of commercial work involving special effects and is currently attached to a couple of science fiction projects.  Noted screenwriter Akiva Goldsman is among the movie’s producers, so it is possible that he has licked the project’s script problems.

The news of progress in the big screen adaptation of Robotech is certainly good news for Palladium Games, which just announced the fall 2013 release of the box set game, Robotech RPG Tactics: The Defense of Macross Island, which will come with dozens of Robotech mecha miniatures.

Howard Jazzed by "Dark Tower" Project

Director Ron Howard is obsessed with adapting Stephen King’s seven-novel Dark Tower series into a movie trilogy bridged by two TV series. Howard told The Washington Post, “I really can't stop thinking about it. We've been meeting and talking, and I've been reading and researching and just kind of living with it.

I've been constantly going through stuff, and I've just been relistening to it (on audio books) on my iPod, and we've been sending e-mails back and forth, 'What about this approach? What do you think of this idea?' We're finding the shape of it. We're moving quickly now, as quickly as we can, and I feel challenged in the most exciting ways."

King’s seven Dark Tower novels encompass a mammoth 3,795 pages and have collectively sold over 30 million copies. Last year King announced that he was working on an eighth book in the series, The Wind Through the Keyhole. Marvel Comics has created a popular comic book adaptation of The Dark Tower, but Universal’s ambitious combination of movies and TV series marks the first really serious attempt to dramatize the groundbreaking fantasy saga.

Howard is working with writer Akiva Goldsman and producer Brian Grazer on The Dark Tower project--the same team responsible for the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind