[[wysiwyg_imageupload:5243:]]Robotech has been in development at Warner Bros. for seven years and it finally looks to get underway with Nic Mathieu on as director.

THR compares the big-budget adaptation of the popular Japanese anime series to be on the scale of Transformers with an exhaustive search conducted for a director that would bring a modern and cutting-edge approach to Robotech.

Nic Mathieu is an up-and-coming feature film director known for his commercial takes and use of CGI. He's also attached to a couple other sci-fi projects at Warner Bros. with The Wind and The Story of Your Life, so this shows how much faith Warner Bros has in Mathieu.

Akiva Goldsman, Matthew Plouffe, Joby Harold, Tory Tunnell and Tobey Maguire are listed as producers. Maguire was previously said to be attached to the role of Rick Hunter; whether that sticks is unknown as there are no new updates on any of the casting and many writers are said to have worked on scripts.

Robotech was first introduced to the U.S. back in 1985 with an 85-episode run, adapted from three Japanese television series. The show centered on alien technology that crash landed on Earth leading to the development of powerful mechs that were used to battle alien invasions.

The announcement of a Robotech movie comes at an interesting time as another mech movie is coming from Warner Bros. with Pacific Rim by Guillermo Del Toro. In Pacific Rim, mankind is under siege by giant monsters known as the Kaiju, with humanity building gigantic robots in response, the Jaegers, to defend themselves. Previous reports seemed to indicate that Warner Bros. was extremely excited and happy about Pacific Rim, which may have opened the door for Robotech.

Back in June, we featured a Robotech casting call article with our very own Lawrence Napoli listing his picks for the Robotech movie. Some of his favorites were: James McAvoy for Rick Hunter, Michael Fassbender as Roy Fokker, Liam Neeson as Breetai, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Maximillion Sterling.