While we’ve known for a while that Hugh Jackman was in talks to star in the robot boxing movie, Real Steel, Variety now reports that he’s now been confirmed for the lead role, and that the movie itself has received the greenlight to go into production.
However this is no normal greenlight, as its the first film given the go ahead by Dreamworks since Spielberg left Paramount a couple of years ago and took the studio name with him. Since then he’s been busy raising $825 million in financing for his reborn independent studio, most of it coming from J.P. Morgan Securities, Reliance Big Pictures and Disney, which will also distribute the new Dreamworks movies.
In Real Steel, which is based on a 1956 short story by Richard Matheson (I Am Legend), Jackman will play an ex-boxer, whose career goes into a tailspin after human fighters are replaced with 2,000 pound humanoid robots. He becomes a boxing promoter, but has trouble with the fact that his bots as rubbish, until he finds a discarded robot who always seems to win. His fight to the top with this new underdog champion also becomes a way for him to bond with the 13-year-old son he never knew he had. Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy will be behind the camera.
However the question mark over the film at the moment is the budget, which is set at around $80 million. Although that sounds a lot, it’s fairly cheap for a big sci-fi event movie, but obviously if Dreamworks spends much more, they’re risking an awful lot of their financing on a single movie. In fact it may be a problem Dreamworks continuously faces, as while it has very ambitious plans, it needs to make a lot of major hits in order to achieve them.
Production of Real Steel is due to start next June.