When Disney/Dreamworks announced recently that they’d bought the rights to the Monsterpocalypse board game and said they were thinking about it as a project for Tim Burton, at the time it was difficult to tell whether they were just being overly optimistic about how interested the Alice In Wonderland filmmaker would be, or if it was a serious possibility. However now /Film has been speaking to producer Roy Lee, and discovered that they didn’t just chuck in Burton’s name to up interest in the project, and that’s he’s actually signed on to actively help develop the movie, with an eye to directing it.
Regular Burton collaborator John August is on screenplay duties, working with the Monsterpocalyse game creator Matt Wilson. According to Roy Lee, “The general take on the film that I can give you is that the giant monsters come to earth and start wreaking havoc. The humans, at this point, fight back. And they feel like theyve destroyed them, but they quickly learn that the monsters that come had actually not died and just sort of burrowed underground and are sending some sort of signal into space. Apparently, it is probably going to be a distress signal. So the humans know that something is going to be coming, they just dont know what yet. And they know how big these monsters can be. Then it cuts to many years later when nothing has come back, but the humans have prepared for possible monsters coming back. And by this time, they have developed these giant robots that will fight the monsters when they come. That is what is going to take place. But most of the movie is going to be during that battle between the giant robots and the giant monsters.”
However while the Monsterpocalyse universe include other properties like Voltron, these won’t be in the film version, with Tim Burton instead working with effects maestro Ken Ralston on creating new monsters and robots.
If all goes well, the 3D movie will be in cinemas before the end of 2012.