Micronauts - What We Know So Far
These days, there's hardly a beloved toy made in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s that hasn't been turned into a feature film or TV show. Everything from G.I. Joe to the Transformers to Battleship has received a live-action movie adaptation. And once the "Micronauts" movie premieres, there will be one more toy-based movie to add to the collection.
The Micronauts are a line of classic science fiction toys from the Japanese Mego corporation that were sold in the United States from 1976 to 1980. They were also the subject of a Marvel Comics series that ran from 1979 to 1986. The Micronauts are groups of warriors who fight in a microscopic reality called the Microverse. As for the real-life toys, the Micronauts' main feature was the ability to be disassembled and combined with other Micronaut action figures and machines.
According to Toy News International, a live-action Micronauts adaptation has been in development since as early as 2009, and it's still in development. Here's everything we know about the tiny warriors' big screen debut.
What is the release date for Micronauts?
The Micronauts movie doesn't have a current release date. In November 2020, the film's distributor, Paramount, removed the movie from its 2021 release schedule. Previously, the Micronauts movie had been scheduled for June 4, 2021 (via Box Office Pro). Before then, the last major production announcement came in September 2019, when Paramount and Hasbro hired Dean DeBlois to direct (via Variety).
Like it did for all movie studios, the coronavirus pandemic forced Paramount to shuffle its release schedule. Like the Micronauts movie, many other films have seen their releases delayed or postponed indefinitely. Meanwhile, others like Paramount's "Tom Clancy's Without Remorse" had their premieres moved to streaming-only.
Based on the previous timeline, we can make an educated guess as to when the Micronauts movie might premiere. Since the time between the DeBlois announcement and the premiere was about a year and nine months, the earliest the Micronauts movie could premiere is late 2022, or possibly early 2023 — and that's presuming everything stays on track. At this point, it's too early to say.
Who is in the cast of Micronauts?
At this point, no date has been announced for the Micronauts movie's start of production, so it's still possible that the script isn't finalized. That means it's much too early for casting announcements — which should come within the next six to nine months, assuming the Micronauts movie is still scheduled to start shooting.
The only announced talent so far is Dean DeBlois, who will be writing and directing. DeBlois previously co-wrote and co-directed "Lilo & Stitch," as well as the "How to Train Your Dragon" movie trilogy. The Micronauts movie will be DeBlois' live-action feature debut.
Otherwise, we can only speculate on which Micronauts characters might appear in the movie version. They include the hero, Arcturus Rann, as well as the primary villain, the ex-scholar turned dictator Baron Karza. Rann heads a team of "Micronaut" commandos that also includes Princess Mari, his love interest, and her brother, Prince Argon, as well as Rann's robot sidekick Biotron.
What is the plot of Micronauts?
Like casting, it's also too early for any information about the plot of the Micronauts movie to be available. The Micronauts movie will be an adaptation, but it hasn't been confirmed whether the Micronauts movie will be a straight adaptation of the toys, or if it will delve the Marvel Comics storylines — or, for that matter, the 2000s-era Image Comics run, the Devil's Due Publishing incarnation, or the IDW run. There are a lot of options.
The Marvel Comics version of "Micronauts" does have many similarities with the toy line, but there's no guarantee the movie will include the comics version — and the movie almost certainly won't be part of the MCU (in fact, the Quantum Realm of the "Ant-Man" movies is just a carefully renamed Microverse, per CBR, so as to avoid complex legal issues). For comparison's sake, "Transformers" was also once a Marvel comic.
If the Micronauts movie is even loosely based on the toys and comics, it would be set in a tiny, futuristic galaxy called the Microverse, where a former scholar named Baron Karza has killed the ruling family and installed himself as dictator. The story begins when the heir to the royal family, Arcturus Rann, returns from a thousand-year space voyage in suspended animation to find his family murdered. That kicks off an epic war between Karza and Rann for control of the Microverse.