Astro Boy 23 Cover - P 2015
Courtesy of Tezuka ProductionsAstro Boy is heading to New Line.
The Warner Bros. division is in negotiations to pick up the rights to the iconic manga and anime character.
At the same time, the company has tapped Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore, the writers who worked on its hit San Andreas, to pen the script.
Animal Logic Entertainment, Ranger 7 Films and Japanese firm Tezuka Productions will produce the feature, which is intended to shed some of its child-skewing trappings and to become a live-action, four-quadrant adventure movie.
Astro Boy was a Japanese manga created in the early 1950s by Osamu Tezuka, who has been described as Japan’s Walt Disney, that ran for decades in comic and newspaper strip form. It was then translated into several anime series that became popular around the world in the 1970s and 1980s.
Hollywood tried several times to bring the character to the big screen, succeeding only with an animated 2009 feature from Imagi Animation. (Freddie Highmore voiced the titular character.)
Astro is a robot boy created by a scientist as a replacement for the man’s dead son. After going on a Pinocchio-style adventure, he ends up with a new owner and a new mission: to fight evil using his many superpowers.
Fabrizio and Passmore created San Andreas, which they sold to New Line as a pitch. The pair also wrote two Bruce Willis action flicks, The Prince and Vice, while Passmore additionally worked on the Red Dawn remake.
The duo is repped by CAA, Adam Goldworm of Aperture Entertainment and Robert Szymanski at Eclipse Law Corp.
