SPOILER ALERT: There’s not much
Just this week, fans of the Gundam franchise received what is probably the best news from 2021 so far. A live action Gundam movie is in the works and it will be coming out on Netflix.
The announcement came from a post from the official Twitter account of Sunrise, the Japanese animation studio that is the home of the Gundam franchise. We don’t know much yet about this upcoming film, save for what the short post has revealed.
This upcoming film will be helmed by “Kong: Skull Island” director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, with “Y: The Last Man” comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan writing the screenplay. Sunrise will oversee the project side-by-side Cole Boyter (“The Butterfly Effect,” “Pokémon: Detective Pikachu”) of Legendary.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what we know, so far. And as far as our experiences with Western live action adaptations of beloved anime titles are concerned, we are keeping our fingers crossed that this upcoming Gundam film will not be a huge disappointment—yes, we’re talking about you, “Dragon Ball Evolution.”
Here’s the thing though. If you can’t wait for this film to launch, there is another live action Gundam title that’s already out there. It’s a Japanese webseries called “Gundam Build Real,” which follows the style of the more recent Gundam animes—i.e., it’s about Gundam plastic model builders putting their Gunplas into the test via some advanced version of augmented reality.
You can check out its first episode below.