Apparently, this was already known, but it passed me by: Takashi Yamazaki, director of the 2023 smash Godzilla Minus One, is making a live-action, English-language giant robot movie called Grandgear.
Grandgear has been in development for a while, but at its CinemaCon presentation on Monday, Sony Pictures announced that it had picked the film up for release on Feb. 18, 2028. J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot is also on board. Yamazaki will write and direct.
The movie hasn’t begun shooting yet and, according to some reports, won’t until next year. Nor has any casting been announced. But Sony showed the CinemaCon audience some test footage of a kaiju-style fight between two huge mecha that The Playlist said “looked fun and slicker than, say, the Pacific Rim universe.”
Yamazaki became an instant hot property when the Japanese-language Godzilla Minus One made an unexpected $113 million at the global box office on a modest $15 million budget. It’s the third-biggest foreign-language movie of all time at the US box office, after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Life is Beautiful. It also won a triumphant Best Visual Effects Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards, beating much bigger productions like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
Before he gets to Grandgear, Yamazaki needs to put the finishing touches to sequel Godzilla Minus Zero, due for release on Nov. 6 this year.
The appeal of Yamazaki taking on a mecha movie is obvious. A former visual effects supervisor who still oversees the VFX on his movies, he has a gift for set-pieces with a massive sense of scale but also a grounded, naturalistic quality. Minus One, with its postwar period setting and back-to-basics approach, was a major shot in the arm for Godzilla.
Grandgear will have some giant-robot competition at the movies, though. Netflix and Legendary are about to start filming a live-action Gundam movie, directed by Jim Mickle (who made the Netflix fantasy series Sweet Tooth) and starring Sydney Sweeney. And there’s a Voltron movie in production at rival Amazon MGM, starring Henry Cavill and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Red Notice). Voltron has already wrapped production and is set for a 2027 release.
Grandgear might be the last movie in this mecha renaissance to see the light of day. But — with all due respect to Mickle and Thurber — my money’s on Yamazaki to be the one to deliver.
