Bandai Namco Filmworks Inc. and Legendary have announced that they have signed an agreement in January 2025 to co-finance Gundam, a Hollywood live-action film adaptation of the Mobile Suit Gundam series.

Produced by Legendary Pictures, the Gundam movie is directed and written by Jim Mickle (best known for directing Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, 2006’s Mulberry Street and 2019’s In The Shadow Of The Moon). The movie will be released worldwide in cinemas.

However, the Gundam movie was originally announced all the way back in 2021, which was previously slated to be under Netflix and director Jordan-Vogt Roberts was previously attached to the project. Now it seems that Netflix is no longer involved and that the movie will have to find a new distributor.

Bandai Namco Filmworks America is a North American subsidiary of Bandai Namco that will be established on 1 April 2025 for the production of GUNDAM. Bandai Namco will work together with Bandai Namco Filmworks to expand its licensing business and the brand value of the Gundam series overseas.

Mobile Suit Gundam, which began broadcasting in 1979, established the genre of “real robot anime” that could not be described in terms of simple good and evil, which had been the trend of robot anime up to that point, with realistic depictions of war, detailed scientific examinations, and intricately interwoven human dramas that treated robots as “weapons” called “mobile suits,” and caused a huge boom.

Since then, as a long-running series, 25 anime series, 34 movies, 27 OVAs, streaming content, event-exclusive footage, TV specials, etc. have been produced, and over its long history up to the present, it has gained a lot of fans around the world. Created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam is an internationally renowned franchise with wide range of product and service categories in addition to the content, generating over $900 million annually. This will be its first live-action film.

For decades, Gundam anime and movies have taken place in separate continuities from each other. They could either tell a Gundam story that is completely original or something that is based on any of the Gundam series that came before. It’s most likely that they will probably adapt the original Mobile Suit Gundam Universal Century timeline, which is the most iconic one.

Check out the poster for the Gundam movie below: