Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

The Man who was (briefly) He-Man is about to have a very good year, notes Alasdair Stuart.

Noah Centineo, beloved in these parts for his work on the To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before franchise has been quietly doing interesting work for a while now. His rom-com work has been uniformly excellent and his transition out into other genres has been just as impressive. Centineo’s amiable himbo energy was perfect for Prince Adam and he would have been a spectacular He-Man but had to step away for scheduling reasons. Since then, though, he’s been excellent and unfairly overlooked in Black Adam, fronted and executive produced well liked Netflix show The Recruit and was excellent (and unrecognisable!) in Warfare earlier this year.

Now, he looks set to step into a Gundam for the long, long gestating movie adaptation of the legendary anime franchise. Set in a future where Earth’s population has spread out into space and the colonies have begun to fight for independence. It’s a colossal franchise and at its core are the Gundam, enormous piloted mecha capable of incredible destructive force. We looked at GQuuuuuuX and Requiem for Vengeance earlier this year but there’s countless other series and entry points.

While we don’t know which time period the movie will adapt, we do know the plot. Sydney Sweeney will play the lead, and the plot is rumoured to be a Romeo and Juliet style romance between her and a pilot on the other side. A pilot, we presume, is played by Centineo. The movie is written and directed by Jim Mickle, who adapted Jeff Lemire’s renowned comic Sweet Tooth for Netflix.

Will it happen? We can’t say. Gundam has been in the works in various forms for years and Sweeney’s recent ethical choices have been, and we’re being enormously charitable here, enormously bad. But right now it’s on.