Usual Suspects/Jack Reacher writer also attached to pen Skydance's remake of space opera anime

The Deadline website is reporting on Wednesday that Christopher McQuarrie has been attached to direct Skydance Productions' planned live-action film remake of Star Blazers. McQuarrie is the screenwriter of The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher , and Jack the Giant Slayer , and he had already been attached to write the project when Skydance ( True Grit, World War Z, Star Trek: Into Darkness, G.I. Joe: Retaliation ) was negotiating for the rights in 2011.

Josh Klein, David Ellison (Skydance head and son of Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison), and Dana Goldberg will be producers on the project, and Shouji Nishizaki (the adopted son of the late Yamato producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki) and Paul Schwake will be executive producers.

Star Blazers is the dubbed and partly rewritten adaptation of Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto's Space Battleship Yamato space opera anime franchise. Deadline notes that Space Battleship Yamato predated Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica , and described the premise: "Earth's atmosphere has been obliterated by a distant alien race, and the survivors have one year before radiation will reach their underground refuge and wipe out the human race. The survivors get a shot of hope in the form of alien technology that can deliver a small crew across the universe and back with the means to stave off extinction."

McQuarrie had revealed in an interview in December 2012 that the film was still in negotiations. Skydance more recently registered the "Starblazersthemovie.com" domain this July.

A live-action film remake of the original Space Battleship Yamato anime opened in Japan in 2010.