Amazon's Voltron movie is gearing up to shoot this fall and, in old-school fashion, will be led by a newcomer
It's been a while since a big-budget adaptation last did this.
Voltron is formed again. Amazon MGM Studios has locked down the starring role for its upcoming live-action Voltron movie with a young newcomer named Daniel Quinn-Toye.
The Hollywood Reporter shared the news, also stating the big-budget project will begin shooting this fall in Australia.
Though Quinn-Toye has no film credits so far, he's appeared on television, getting credits on BBC Three's Badults and one episode of Starz's Outlander. Apparently, it was his stage work that landed the 21-year-old the role. He's attended London's Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts as well as the Dance School of Scotland, and was the main understudy to Tom Holland "in the West End production of Romeo & Juliet." With that production, he played the role of Paris, a suitor to Juliet.
This is the sort of move that studios dared to do back in the day all the time, and has become rarer and rarer with each passing decade. Sure, star power helps sell risky and/or expensive projects, but you can save that for supporting roles and give young up-and-coming actors a chance to shine and surprise critics and audiences alike by starring in a massive blockbuster.
In the director's chair, we find Rawson Marshall Thurber, the filmmaker behind the Netflix hit (though you can ask around and most people won't remember it) Red Notice, which was led by Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot. A Voltron project had been in the works for a while at Amazon, but it only picked up steam in early 2022. Even though Netflix handled Voltron: Legendary Defender, the latest animated iteration of the long-running franchise, the live-action movie went to Amazon MGM Studios.
Voltron is based on the Japanese sci-fi series Beast King GoLion and Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV. As a syndicated show, it was named Voltron: Defender of the Universe and was aired in the mid-1980s. "The premise centered on five young pilots in a battalion named the Robot Lions, which are vehicles that join together to form a mega-robot known as Voltron."
More shows were created and aired regularly over the years, and a live-action movie was a tentative project that was brought up over and over again without much success, so this adaptation (in many ways similar to Amazon's upcoming take, after many troubles, on Masters of Universe) was a long time coming.