Live-action Robotech Movie

[Seto Kaiba]

On 6/12/2023 at 9:09 PM, Thom said:

@Seto Kaiba Even more reason not to care about anything concerning Harmony Gold.

On 6/13/2023 at 7:30 PM, pengbuzz said:

With all the times this has popped back up then gone away, would it be fair to say that "the RT movie" now qualifies more as zombie apocalypse horror than it would sci-fi/ anime?

Yeah... Harmony Gold is dodgy AF and Robotech is pretty much the anime franchise equivalent of "peaked in high school guy".

 

 

13 hours ago, jenius said:

So Sony must have been convinced they could get BW to buy-in somehow because that definitely looks more like "live action Macross" than it has any business in doing. Honestly, I'm sure Sony could have, they certainly have the means. Maybe release it in Japan as TLA Macross via the reverse Robotech treatment. 

Or the guy who posted it could just be lying.  That's a very real possibility.

That it's all Macross based when Harmony Gold and its licensees know full well they can't do that, and that it looks like it was made with Stable Diffusion or another art AI, is pretty damned suspicious.  It'd hardly be the first time a Robotech fan made up a bunch of BS about a cancelled project in an attempt to bolster their fan credentials.

The alternatives are that Harmony Gold somehow forgot to tell the artist he can't reference Macross, or that they were just using this to establish a tone the way the Wachowskis did with Ghost in the Shell when pitching and developing The Matrix.

 

34 minutes ago, Knight26 said:

None of this artwork feels real to me.  The SDF-1 is always at some odd angle, bits blended together and it is never shown in robot mode, then the fighters, just terrible, again no battroid mode and the fighters are horrid kitbashes.  It stinks of AI art or bad fan art.

Yeah, that's my read of it too... though I lean heavily towards "AI art".

 

5 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

I'm wondering if all the artwork is based on a script?? If so, I'd love to read whats in it!

As far as we know, they've never gotten farther than paying for a few story treatments... 

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah... Harmony Gold is dodgy AF and Robotech is pretty much the anime franchise equivalent of "peaked in high school guy".

More like “ peaked in elementary school kid”. 
as far as the AI thing, it almost looks like images that I’ve already seen and maybe by another AI Robotech thing. There are a few images that look really familiar and may have been reused from somewhere else

[DewPoint]

The highest hurdle has always been: can't touch the most popular parts of the IP, and you need to do something mostly original.  With those restrictions, you may as well make an entirely new sci-fi movie and not pay any royalties to HG. Saves you money and legal headache.  Can someone make it worth paying the royalties and be successful?  I suspect that would be extremely difficult.

[electric indigo]

21 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

I'm wondering if all the artwork is based on a script?? If so, I'd love to read whats in it!

The kotako article mentions a script.

"Most illustrations focus on the SDF-1, Macross Island (whose vibes Price absolutely nails here) and redesigned Veritech fighters, though there are also some works showcasing original plot elements (like the oil rigs) that would have been new for this particular film. "

[Thom]

Ugh, why 'redesign?' The fighters are beautiful and purposeful as they are. As is most every other mech on the series. Just do a faithful adaptation, esp if they are interested in an actual Robocross movie, which is the rub... Cause they are not.

[azrael]

4 hours ago, Thom said:

Ugh, why 'redesign?' The fighters are beautiful and purposeful as they are. As is most every other mech on the series. Just do a faithful adaptation, esp if they are interested in an actual Robocross movie, which is the rub... Cause they are not.

"Redesign" because if you don't, you would owe more money for using someone's copyrighted designs. We've said for a decade+ now, for RT to survive, it needs to come up with it's own designs; it's own IP. Until that day comes...

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, electric indigo said:

The kotako article mentions a script.

"Most illustrations focus on the SDF-1, Macross Island (whose vibes Price absolutely nails here) and redesigned Veritech fighters, though there are also some works showcasing original plot elements (like the oil rigs) that would have been new for this particular film. "

It doesn't use the word "script" at all... it just mentions that there are things in the pictures that were not in the animation of Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA.

It's just sloppy reportage jumping to assumptions in order to make this nothingburger seem like something to meet a word count.

 

6 hours ago, Thom said:

Ugh, why 'redesign?' The fighters are beautiful and purposeful as they are. As is most every other mech on the series. Just do a faithful adaptation, esp if they are interested in an actual Robocross movie, which is the rub... Cause they are not.

Simply put... because they can't legally do that and because that is counter to their intended purpose of getting away from "you can't legally do that" scenarios.

Harmony Gold's license to Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA only grants them the distribution and merchandising rights to those shows outside of Japan.  All they can do with that material is release those shows on broadcast/cable/streaming/home video, edit them for distribution (e.g. dub, cut out objectionable material), and produce merchandise based on the contents of those shows.  

The intellectual property rights to those original shows - the ownership of the original stories, concepts, designs, etc. AKA the copyrights on that material - belong to the creators of the original shows.  Harmony Gold cannot use any of that material in new film works without first obtaining permission to use that material in the form of a license.  In the past, they have been able to obtain limited licenses to use the designs from Southern Cross and MOSPEADA in their own original works (e.g. Sentinels, Shadow Chronicles) because those shows are owned by Tatsunoko Production and the cost of the license is peanuts because those shows are old and forgotten and were never commercially successful to begin with.  Using designs from Macross has always been a bridge too far because Macross is a popular and successful series with its own much more successful franchise and isn't owned by Harmony Gold's longtime partner Tatsunoko Production.  They would have to get a license from Big West and Studio Nue, which would not only be prohibitively expensive but also a difficult proposition due to relations between the HG and Macross's owners being bad.  No matter how much money is offered, Big West/Studio Nue can just say "No" if they don't want to dilute their brand by letting HG use part of their IP or take a risk on whatever HG has planned.

Harmony Gold's goal for the proposed live action movie was specifically to get away from that legal rigmarole of having to get licenses and approvals and send absolutely every decision through multiple rounds of legal review as they've been doing since ~2000 by making a clean break with the Robotech animated series and starting over from scratch to develop an all-new, all-original Robotech they could capitalize on without needing to buy licenses from, and pay royalties to, Tatsunoko or any other party.  

The catch, of course, being that Macross is the only part of Robotech that the vast majority of Robotech fans care about and the only part that has any brand recognition.  Bereft of the original Macross series, Robotech doesn't have any brand recognition to speak of that would drive audiences to see a Robotech movie so why would any studio actually make a movie if all they're really getting for the license is the title.  They could make exactly the same all-original sci-fi movie and pay Harmony Gold nothing just by not using the title, so why bother?  

That Harmony Gold can't, and never planned to, use Macross in their proposed live action movie also makes it profoundly unlikely that this alleged concept art is legitimately from the project.  Why pay for concept art for something you literally cannot do?

Edited June 17, 2023 by Seto Kaiba

[Thom]

Not if Big West makes it.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

Not if Big West makes it.

Well, yes... but Big West isn't making it, and by all accounts Harmony Gold doesn't want them involved either.

The movie proposal is for a reimagining, not an adaptation, because Harmony Gold wants to use it to launch a new Robotech metaseries that isn't dependent on licensed IP.  

It's all about making something truly original so they can stop living in fear of Big West and Tatsunoko's lawyers the way they've been doing for the last 23 years.

[jenius]

Maybe that was HG's plan but Sony had other ideas? HG had constraints, Sony has the means to remove them. The whole idea of getting the license makes a lot more sense if they could leverage what's popular about it.

[pengbuzz]

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......

[DewPoint]

Which leads us back to: after paying out for all the licenses required, does it still make finical sense?    I'm sure a lot of us wouldn't mind seeing it made just to find out the aftermath. It would be serious amazing if the did manage to pull it off and make it profitable.

[Seto Kaiba]

39 minutes ago, jenius said:

Maybe that was HG's plan but Sony had other ideas? HG had constraints, Sony has the means to remove them. The whole idea of getting the license makes a lot more sense if they could leverage what's popular about it.

It's doubtful Sony had a plan at all.

The only reason WB picked up the movie rights was because Transformers was making serious bank for Paramount, and Robotech just happened to be a contemporary of the original Transformers cartoon that also had giant robots. The same is almost certainly true for Sony, given the Robotech license's only real value is its tangental relationship to the cash cow of one of their major competitors in the event that giant robots became a major trend somehow. Otherwise, the license is worthless because it doesn't grant any access to the actual content of the show. They're paying for a name and nothing else, but they're not paying much.

 

12 minutes ago, DewPoint said:

Which leads us back to: after paying out for all the licenses required, does it still make finical sense?    I'm sure a lot of us wouldn't mind seeing it made just to find out the aftermath. It would be serious amazing if the did manage to pull it off and make it profitable.

Probably not. If there was a financial argument for the Robotech movie, it wouldn't have spent the last 15 years in development hell with nothing to show for it but a handful of story treatments and possibly some extremely dodgy concept art.

As it stands, if they were to somehow convinced Big West to agree to let them use the Macross designs, they'd have to pay quite a bit for a license and presumably pay some pretty significant royalties to Big West for the use of that IP. It'd be a fairly safe bet that Big West would make far more money on the movie than Harmony Gold would... to the point that it would probably be cheaper to cut Harmony Gold out of the loop entirely.

[jenius]

So, basically, nobody knows, we can't make sense of it, and it won't matter because it's never getting made. Maybe Sony was going to buy BW and put Macross on Crunchyroll.

[Duke Togo]

7 hours ago, jenius said:

So, basically, nobody knows, we can't make sense of it, and it won't matter because it's never getting made.

That's a bingo!

[Dynaman]

And of course this entire recent discussion started from pictures "from a failed attempt a few years back"...

[Thom]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

...

It's all about making something truly original so they can stop living in fear of Big West and Tatsunoko's lawyers the way they've been doing for the last 23 years.

And that's to my previous post about them wasting all their time on trying to wrestle someone else's creation as their own, when they could have been creating/making their own stuff.😜

11 hours ago, DewPoint said:

Which leads us back to: after paying out for all the licenses required, does it still make finical sense?    I'm sure a lot of us wouldn't mind seeing it made just to find out the aftermath. It would be serious amazing if the did manage to pull it off and make it profitable.

I fear that what we would end up seeing is something too much like Independence Day 1 and 2.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

12 hours ago, jenius said:

So, basically, nobody knows, we can't make sense of it, and it won't matter because it's never getting made.

Yeah, nobody knows for certain. The one potential explanation that we have that makes logical sense is that WB and Sony each independently picked up the Robotech rights for no reason other than its incidental relationship to Transformers... with neither having any intention to actually produce such a film, only to deny the rights to others.

 

1 hour ago, Thom said:

And that's to my previous post about them wasting all their time on trying to wrestle someone else's creation as their own, when they could have been creating/making their own stuff.😜

 

Like I said, the money and the talent to develop original material were just never there for Robotech. The whole thing was a minimally funded fly-by-night operation from the outset and its unremarkable ratings and poor merchandise sales did not inspire anyone to make significant capital investments in it even in the '80s.

They did the best they could with what they had, and what they had was a pittance, a bad reputation, and a showrunner who was quite frankly a hack.

 

1 hour ago, Thom said:

I fear that what we would end up seeing is something too much like Independence Day 1 and 2.

Which is probably another reason it's never getting made...

[Thom]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

...

Like I said, the money and the talent to develop original material were just never there for Robotech. The whole thing was a minimally funded fly-by-night operation from the outset and its unremarkable ratings and poor merchandise sales did not inspire anyone to make significant capital investments in it even in the '80s.

They did the best they could with what they had, and what they had was a pittance, a bad reputation, and a showrunner who was quite frankly a hack.

...

Well they had the money. That's supported by decades of legal back and forth, with lawyer fees better spent on hiring those talented artists rather than the water-treading hacks.

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Thom said:

Well they had the money. That's supported by decades of legal back and forth, with lawyer fees better spent on hiring those talented artists rather than the water-treading hacks.

Eh... I can see why you might think so, but it's misleading.

Yes, Harmony Gold has been involved in quite a number of "legal disputes" related to their Robotech franchise over the last 24 or so years... if we paint with a very broad brush.  In truth, most of those "disputes" were little more than exchanges of Cease and Desist notices like the attempts to stifle the import of Macross toys in 1999.  Those have supposedly come from a document prep service rather than an actual attorney.  They've only had a few actual court sessions or binding arbitrations since 1999 and it's abundantly clear from the publicly available records of those that Harmony Gold is just as miserly when it comes to their legal representation as they are with Robotech's development and production.

Spoiler

Thus far, my favorite "then Harmony Gold's lawyer said" moment is from their binding arbitration with Tatsunoko over royalties owed when the attorney representing HG forgot how copyright law works and made the very incorrect assertion that since Tatsunoko had authorized HG to use MOSPEADA designs in Shadow Chronicles, HG was now the co-owner of those copyrighted designs.  

Also, one thing we learned a while back was that Harmony Gold wasn't paying for those days in court out of pocket either.  They were deducting those court costs and attorney's fees from the royalties they were paying to Tatsunoko for the three shows because the license allowed them to do that in exchange for being required to take legal action on the behalf of the Japanese IP owners in certain cases.

[Swann]

I'm glad the Tobytech film. Wasn't made. I also heard little toby maguire was going to star in it too.

[Thom]

2 hours ago, Swann said:

I'm glad the Tobytech film. Wasn't made. I also heard little toby maguire was going to star in it too.

High on Spiderman success, yes.

[Swann]

43 minutes ago, Thom said:

High on Spiderman success, yes.

Hated him in spider man and yeah toby would have ruin the "Robotech" film too

[Thom]

12 hours ago, Swann said:

Hated him in spider man and yeah toby would have ruin the "Robotech" film too

Actually, the Toby Maguire ones are still my favorite live action Spiderman movies. That's not to say he would have been a fit for Hikar- (ahum) Rick Hunter.