At the end of March, it was announced that Sony was getting a ROBOTECH movie off the ground. In the month since, FURIOUS 7 has become the fourth largest international grosser of ALL TIME, and the quickest to ever reach a billion dollars. So now, James Wan joins Justin Lin in the club of “dudes who can direct ridiculous, impossible action scenes in a way that does not alienate mass audiences.” And it seems Sony wants a piece of that, and is willing to steal him from Universal before they can sign him for the recently-announced F8.
Wan’s in talks to helm ROBOTECH for Sony, which would ostensibly take him off the table to direct the follow-up to FURIOUS 7, currently set for April 2017. Don’t forget, he’s still set to direct the CONJURING sequel due out next year. Production for that is scheduled to begin this summer.
We were hearing that these next three FURIOUSes were going to form a sort of trilogy, the same way Lin’s tenure felt cohesive (mostly due to the character of Han), so it’s something of a bummer that Wan isn’t jumping feet first into the world of Dom, Letty, Hobbs, and Mr. Nobody. But there’s one thing Deadline mentions that is crucial: unlike THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, Wan would be with ROBOTECH from the ground up, making him a creative (and financial) godfather to the franchise in the same fashion as his position in the CONJURING/ANNABELLE-verse. Some folks complained that, a few eye-catching camera rotations notwithstanding, Wan wasn’t able to differentiate too far from the precedent set by Lin (and his predecessors), so it’s not like directing these flicks is doing much to flex his talents as an auteur. Besides, it’s Vin Diesel’s show as much as anyone else’s at this point, and it’s not a stretch that Wan would want to deviate from that level of star-power to focus on something he can get more hands-on with.
As for his take on ROBOTECH, well, once you’ve sold the idea of a bunch of L.A./Miami street punks perfectly parachuting a handful of muscle cars onto the side of a rocky mountain, you’ve can sell anything, amirite?
