Commercial Director Nic Mathieu Tapped For ROBOTECH

Commercial director Nic Mathieu has been picked by Warner Brothers to direct their long in development adaptation of the popular anime Robotech.

The project has gone through a number of writers including Lawrence Kasdan, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and most recently Tom Rob Smith. It is unknown if Mathieu will be working from Smith’s draft, bringing in another writer for a rewrite more to his liking or if he will just start from scratch.

The anime’s story revolves a group of young hotshots who pilot mecha, a combination robot/fighter plane created from technology reverse-engineered from a crashed alien space craft. The pilots are repelling an alien invasion which is bent on retrieving something from the crashed space craft known as “protoculture.” Needless to say, with its Transformers-like giant robot action, the studio is looking at this as a potential franchise launcher.

This is not the first live action anime adaptation that the studio has worked on. They have also spent several years and probably a lot of development funds into trying to bring the classic anime feature film Akira to the big screen with no results.

Although he has not directed a feature film, this is not Mathieu’s first directorial assignment however.He is currently attached to the David Koep-scripted science-fiction film The Wind and the alien drama The Story of Your Life. There is no word yet as to whether he’ll do one, both or neither of these two projects before Robotech.

Via Hollywood Reporter.