Plans for a live-action Astro Boy movie were first announced last year, when original production company Tezuka Productions and Animal Logic (the folks behind The LEGO Movie) joined forces to develop a film based on the classic character. Since then, we haven’t heard anything about the project, but it looks as though the studios are finally preparing to blast off as New Line has come on board to distribute the film, with the writers of San Andreas penning the screenplay.

Astro Boy’s last big screen outing was the animated 2009 film, which generated $40 million internationally on a $65 million budget — not exactly promising, but as Variety reports, Animal Logic and Tezuka are ready to give it another go, and hopefully with the involvement of the design company behind The LEGO Movie, we’ll get a far better contemporary adaptation.

San Andreas scribes Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore have been brought on to write the screenplay, which is based on Osamu Tezuka’s classic character, who made his debut in 1951 under the original name Mighty Atom, and had his own television series in the ’80s. Astro Boy is set in a future where humans and robots co-exist, and centers on an android boy created by Doctor Tenma, the head of the Ministry of Science, and is eventually adopted by a professor who discovers that the boy has immense power and intelligence, and thus Astro becomes a superhero.

 

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