A part of me wants to automatically give the benefit of the doubt to movies based on toys just to counterbalance all the critics/commentators who still act like the very IDEA of these projects is an affront to the medium itself. There's no reason you can't make a decent movie out of a toy franchise with the right people working on it; even if that hasn't happened much so far.
In any case, Paramount and Hasbro - still swimming in cash from their awful yet awfully-successful "Transformers" movies - have tapped JJ Abrams and the hot writing due from "Zombieland" to put together a feature/franchise based on the late-70s/early-80s "MICRONAUTS" figure line. I'm indifferent to Abrams at this point, but the Zombieland dudes are good people.
This is where this story get's kind of interesting, in a "convoluted corporate politics of Hollywood way..
Okay, so... "Micronauts" actually date from before the idea of assinging some semblance of a storyline to toy lines; so initially they didn't really have a "universe" beyond character names and assingments of good/bad. The line was actually the U.S. import of Japan's mega-popular "Microman" figures (themselves a spinoff of a Japanese robot-version of the G.I. Joe molds toy history is a fucking RABBIT HOLE!) and the big hook was that they were modular; i.e. you could pop some of the arms/legs/etc off the figures and their vehicles and swap them around in new combinations. Some of said vehicles actually got repurposed into some of the G1 Transformers (RABBIT HOLE!!!)
The line got a story when Marvel Comics writer Bill Mantlo saw his son playing with them and convinced his bosses to license the rights. It was Mantlo who created (with some inspiration from the original Microman backstory) the characterizations for the Micronauts; along with a pretty keen story gimmick: The Micronauts themselves hail from a "Microverse," and when their epic Star Wars-esque struggle spills over to Earth they find themselves to be the proportionate size of the "Micronauts" action figures. That's kind of brilliant, really, and would still be a killer movie hook for today - hey kids, your toys ARE The Micronauts!!!
BUT that's probably not the story (at least not exactly) that the new Hasbro/Paramount film will be working from, even if it wanted to - see, most of the original-to-the-comics stuff that Mantlo came up with is still owned by Marvel, which in turn is owned by rival movie studio Disney. In fact, several of the Mantlo-reworked characters are still kicking around the Marvel Universe, albeit with any official Micronauts branding discreetly stripped away. At least one of them is actually supposed to be part of the new "Gaurdians of The Galaxy;" which Marvel is angling to be a movie of it's own down the line.
So... eventually someone takes another whack at He-Man, right? That happens before this all topples over?
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