Max Steel was last heard from in 2014, and many assumed the movie was dead. Then a Japanese trailer long on spectacle and short on giving you any sense of the movie popped up out of nowhere, and the movie suddenly had a release date. Fortunately this trailer makes a lot more sense, albeit looking rather conventional.
For those unfamiliar, Max Steel, the action figure line this movie is based on, is a pretty conventional superhero story. Max (Ben Winchell), a teenager, discovers he has superpowers thanks to the research of his father, and has to team up with the snarky talking robot Steel (Josh Brener of Silicon Valley) to harness his abilities and also put on an awesome superhero suit. The character has enjoyed modest but steady success in the U.S., with a cartoon on Disney XD and a toy line coming up on its twentieth anniversary, but he’s a much bigger deal in Latin America, which is probably why this movie got made in the first place. Well, either that or so we could have this GIF:
As for the movie, it looks like a superhero story in the Marvel mold, albeit aimed slightly more towards kids. There seems to have been some trouble behind the scenes; in a Q&A, the director alludes to some issues between distributor Open Road and Mattel, the toy company that owns Max. The presence of Maria Bello and Andy Garcia remain baffling, but, hey, they’re parents, too. The bigger question is how this movie, which probably wasn’t on audience’s radars until a couple of weeks ago, is going to fare at the box office, which we’ll learn October 14.
(via Yahoo! Movies)
