Filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie has been busy at the helm of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise for much of the past decade and so hasn’t really had time to direct many of the films he’s been linked to in the past.
One passion project that has been hovering for well over a decade is a live-action feature film adaptation of the 1970s animated television series “Star Blazers”.
The property itself is an adaptation of the Japanese anime property “Space Battleship Yamato” which was re-dubbed and re-edited into the series “Star Blazers” in Western markets. It was the first popular English-translated anime that had an overarching plot and storyline that required viewing every episode in order, along with more mature themes than most other shows of the time.
Skydance Media hired McQuarrie to write and produce the film in February 2011 and then jumped on board to direct in 2013 as a potential post-“Reacher” project. Then along came “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” which took priority and changed the course of McQuarrie’s career.
Four years later, Zach Dean was hired to write a new draft of the film. Since then, there’s been no apparent progress. Speaking with Collider, McQuarrie says he loves the property, but he doesn’t feel that studio executives share his passion:
“We went to Skydance, we set the project up there, and we tried to get it done as a feature, we tried to get it done as a limited series, we went to streaming, and streaming was booming, and nobody wanted it. Nobody touched it. Nobody would pick it up.
The problem [with] ‘Star Blazers’ is there wasn’t an element there. You didn’t have a big name that got them excited, mine didn’t seem to, and the IP didn’t really get them excited… There wasn’t any traction, there wasn’t any excitement, and you couldn’t convince people. There are four great space operas, and this is the one that’s never really been done.
We went so vast with it. It was so amazing, and it could have gone on forever. It’s a world I really love, but you can’t convince people something is great. Other people have to convince them it’s great by wanting it first. If you can’t get that ignition started, it’s DOA.”
Confirming he’s been working on the project going back well over ten years, he adds, “many of the issues and so many of the trends and so many of the things that you see happening in film right now were all in there”.
Other projects McQuarrie has been linked to in the past decade or so include an adaptation of author Douglas Preston’s non-fiction work “The Monster of Florence,” a remake of 1968’s Alistair McLean adaptation “Ice Station Zebra,” an adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel “Three To Kill,” and the biopic “The Chameleon” about a famed French serial impostor.
More recently, he and Tom Cruise have also been developing a new “Reacher-like thriller” film that’s grittier than the ‘Mission’ movies and an original musical together.
