The Next Big Thing - We Mean Really Big

Even though the live action version of Speed Racer crashed and burned at the box office, producers aren't giving up on movies inspired by Japanese animated cartoon or anime.

Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (the muscle behind TV's Smallville) are writing the film version of the long-running Robotech with Spidey himself, Tobey Maguire, among the producers.

Robotech is set in a the future when giant robots have been constructed using technology from an alien spaceship that is discovered in the South Pacific. Good timing, too, since the robots are used to beat back an invasion from space.

The series came to the US in the middle 1980s when the cartoons were stitched into three separate series: The Macross Saga, Robotech Masters, and Robotech: The New Generation.