Posted in: Amazon, Movies | Tagged: voltron

The Cast Of The Live-Action Voltron Film Adds 5 New Cast Members

The cast of the live-action Voltron film has added five new cast members, including Sterling K. Brown, Rita Ora, John Kim, and more.

A live-action Voltron film has been in varying levels of development for a very long time now, but every time it seems like it's about to get off the ground, the production ends up falling apart—the media landscape when the concept first started floating around in Hollywood back in the early 2000s. For a long time, the only people capable of even pulling off a concept like Voltron were one of the big studios with the backing of a massive budget. Streamers have come into the mix, and studios like Amazon, who are playing both sides of the distribution coin, have more money than God to throw around.

Amazon and MGM are the latest to attempt to make a live-action Voltron film happen. Henry Cavill was the name that got everyone first to start paying attention. He would be starring in the movie with newcomer Daniel Quinn-Toye from director Rawson Marshall Thurber with a screenplay co-written by Thurber and Ellen Shanman. Over the last week, the cast has started to fill out. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Sterling K. Brown, Rita Ora, and John Kim had all joined the cast, while Variety reported that Laura Gordon and Tim Griffin have also signed on. The cast also reportedly includes Alba Baptista, Samson Kayo, and Tharanya Tharan, so it sounds like we might have an entire cast, more or less.

We don't know much about the film yet or who anyone will play, but it sounds like Thurber specifically is excited about the project. Not long after his involvement was announced, he reportedly shared the following message with fans at VoltCon in Indianapolis last month: "I want to make sure that we stay true to the heart and the spirit of Voltron. In this film, we're going to be introducing an entirely new generation of pilots. We've reimagined Voltron for the live-action world, but we're going to stay true to … those iconic elements that you love, that I love."

Will Voltron Work In Live-Action?

Voltron has been a staple of the mecha genre for longer than a decent amount of people reading this article have been alive. The first run of the television show ran from 1984-1985, and the show was moderately consistent, with three more series premiering from 1985 to 2000. From there, the show took its longest break from television but returned on Nicktoons with Voltron Force for one season from 2011-2012. However, that show didn't really catch on and only ran for one season. In 2016, Netflix acquired the rights and produced Voltron: Legendary Defender, which ran for eight seasons over the next two and a half years and brought in a whole new generation of fans. 

Like most things popular in the 1980s, someone has been trying to make a live-action Voltron movie for a long time. The first time someone announced their intentions to make a live-action film was in 2005, and things have been a mess ever since, including that one time everyone thought Cloverfield was a Voltron movie. It wasn't until March 2022, when it was announced that Thurber would be directing, that there appeared to be any real movement toward this project actually happening.

Now we have actors signed on, so maybe we'll see this movie in our lifetime, but we'll have to see. Some concepts just aren't made for live-action, and you have to wonder if Voltron is one of them. Power Rangers and things like that worked because they weren't trying to look real, but when Power Rangers tried to make everything look real and shiny, no one cared. Transformers hasn't worked in live-action except for once, kind of, and even then, the best thing we have gotten out of Transformers in the last two decades is the animated film in theaters right now [go watch it]. At the moment, we have no other details about the production.

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