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Look out, Pokemon! Beyblades getting ready to battle on the big screen with Jerry Bruckheimer
Jerry Bruckheimer is on board to produce the live-action Beyblade feature at Paramount.
Beyblades — those spinner toys where you use a special launcher (aka a BeyLauncher) to have them “battle” each other in an enclosed arena (aka a Beystadium) — appear to be the latest toy franchise to get a live-action feature adaptation.
According to Deadline, Jerry Bruckheimer of Pirates of the Caribbean, Lucifer, and National Treasure fame is on board to produce the movie at Paramount, with Neil Widener and Gavin James writing the script.
This live-action project isn’t the first adaptation of Beyblade toys into other forms of entertainment. The toys, which are a direct competitor with Pokemon, have already been the focus of several manga and animated series, which makes a live-action feature adaptation more of an obvious next step than Paramount and Bruckheimer just saying, "Hey! These toys are cool!"
We don’t have details about the plot for this new project yet, so we don’t have an inkling as to how a bunch of toy tops will translate into a live-action movie. Will the Beyblades walk and talk among regular humans? Or will live-action people become entwined in a Beyblade tournament where the stakes are high and tops keep spinning? Or something else completely? The possibilities are dizzyingly endless, and we’ll have to wait to see what Widener and James, whose previous credits include Now You See Me 3 and San Andreas 2, come up with.
Whatever transpires in this first Beyblade movie, there’s a good chance we’ll see other Beyblade features down the road given people have bought hundreds of millions of these tops over the years. Whether Beyblades becomes the next Transformers for Paramount, however, remains to be seen.
We also don’t have any news yet on the timeline for the production, though this project is also just one of many films Bruckheimer has in the works at Paramount. The producer is also behind Top Gun: Maverick, which is set to come out on May 27, 2022, as well as a television adaptation of American Giglio starring Owen Wilson in development at Paramount TV.
