It producer Roy Lee’s next project is a little bigger than creepy clowns hiding in sewers—literally bigger, because it’s a plan to bring the far-future Japanese robo-epic Ma.K to live action for Warner Bros.
Also known as Maschinen Krieger and, in its earliest form, SF3D, Kow Yokoyama (who will produce the movie alongside Lee) and Hiroshi Ichimura’s scifi mecha series ran in the pages of tabletop gaming magazine Hobby Japan in the mid-1980s, but Yokoyama’s futuristic designs—blending traditional mecha styles with the aesthetic of real-world armor from the First and Second World Wars—are best known in Japan and the rest of the world through the myriad model kits that have been based on them since Ma.K came to a close.
The series, set thousands of years in the future after a fourth world war has wiped out most of humanity, leaving the survivors to flee their now-uninhabitable planet for a generation before coming back to slowly recolonize mankind’s homeworld. And, you know, devolve into factions that occasionally fight each other with bipedal tanks and giant robots, as you rightly should. Yokohama’s designs definitely make for the sort of mecha we don’t really see on the big screen on a regular basis, so it’ll be interesting to see how they’re brought to life here.
[THR]
