Hasbro has essentially been working on the table of large-screen toy adaptations for the past 15 years or so, but its Mattel competitors have quietly put together a few plans together lately. There’s the new one Chin film that has been in the works for years, with Margot Robbie now attached to the star and Greta Gerwig (!) And Noah Baumbach (!) Prepared to write the screenplay (We are still not convinced that all this is true), and in February we learned about Lil Yachty who plays in an “action comedy” based on one (which also doesn’t make much sense, but we’re willing to roll over). Now, Mattel seems to have landed on a much simpler movie with variety Report Vin Diesel will star in a live action movie for Mattel and Universal, based on Rock ‘Em Sock’ Em Robots—The classic game of hitting a small button until you either hit your opponent’s head or break the game and then start crying.
The film will be about a father and son who “form an unlikely connection to an advanced war machine” and before trying to claim that everything is very similar to the plot of the 2011 film Hugh Jackman Real steel, we have a counterpoint: no one remembers Real steel, so no one will notice or care if it’s exactly the same movie. (That one was explicitly about boxing and it seems to be rather a Harry and The Hendersons– type story about an unusual family friend, but sure, they are both about robots that give blows.) Also, just to interrupt you before making other jokes, Diesel will play the father and not the robot. He once played a robot and was very good at it, and his name sounds like the name of a robot, but he plays a man with a son.
If you want to make jokes, let’s talk about Diesel’s statement about this ad, in which he talks about how excited he is to combine a classic game with “the kind of success in building the world, the franchise I had with Universal” . This is a man who lives for sequels and spin-offs and has to kill him like that Blood it was a flop. But we can all forget about it, because here comes an interesting new movie franchise called Rock ‘Em Sock’ Em Robots!