Trailer not playing? Watch it on YouTube. That’s Netflix’s own animated Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance above, which is the nearest thing to moving pictures of the live-action film anyone is going to get for a while.
Somewhere in a post-production suite, a roomful of visual effects artists is drawing sixty-foot robots around Sydney Sweeney. Legendary’s live-action Gundam, written and directed by Jim Mickle of Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, wrapped in July after three months of shooting in Queensland, on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane and Toowoomba. Since then it has gone quiet in the way only very expensive films can. Netflix has the distribution rights, and Bandai Namco Filmworks, the old Sunrise outfit that started all this in 1979, is riding in the co-pilot’s seat.
What is known comes in fragments. Netflix’s synopsis promises rival mech pilots on opposite sides of a decades-long war between Earth and its former space colonies, which is Gundam boiled down to a single sentence. Noah Centineo, who stars opposite Sweeney, told the Happy Sad Confused podcast it was “a big action-romance space movie” set in the Universal Century timeline, and has since reduced it further to Romeo and Juliet in space. Presumably the Federation are the Montagues, Zeon are the Capulets and the balcony is in low orbit. The supporting cast includes Jason Isaacs, Michael Mando, Nonso Anozie, Javon Walton, Jackson White and Shioli Kutsuna. Isaacs could play a masked Zeon officer with a grudge in his sleep, and if there is any justice, he will.
Universal Century devotees will spot one awkward detail. In the first week of the One Year War, Zeon dropped an entire space colony on Earth and it came down on Sydney, which it flattened into a bay. Shooting the film in Australia with a Sydney in the lead is either a coincidence or the most elaborate apology in franchise history.
The doomed romance is, in fairness, quite on brand. Yoshiyuki Tomino, who turned 85 last week, built the whole thing on teenagers in mass-produced weapons who did not always come home, and Amuro and Lalah had a cross-battle-lines tragedy back in 1979. Shakespeare also killed both his lovers off in the final act, so “Kill ’Em All Tomino” may yet approve. Mickle, for his part, sent a video message to this year’s Gundam Conference promising famous ships and Mobile Suits from the series along with new designs, which is reassuring for anyone who remembers G-Saviour, the 1999 live-action TV film the franchise has kept quietly in the loft ever since.
There is no release date, and the plan is still a streaming debut. MovieWeb argued this week that Netflix should put it into cinemas, and the argument has some weight. Sweeney has turned modest films into slow-burning hits (Anyone But You opened at $6 million and climbed to $220 million worldwide; The Housemaid passed $400 million), and Netflix is already sending Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew into IMAX and cinemas on 12 February 2027 for seven weeks before it streams on 2 April. There is also a simpler point: a sixty-foot mobile suit on a phone screen is a three-inch mobile suit. Netflix hasn’t said a word either way.
Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll reserve judgement until there is an actual frame of film to look at. Meanwhile, if Bandai doesn’t have a 1/144 scale Sweeney-piloted kit on the shelves by launch day, someone in its marketing department deserves a posting to the Loum front.
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