Every so often a project has the masses greatly excited and then BOOM, its progress is shut down and the project is killed. This is apparently what has happened to the new He-Man project that was being developed at Warner Bros. called Grayskull: Masters of the Universe.

All this comes as a shock because not too long ago, Latino Review — who also broke this bad news — was able to read the script by Justin Marks and absolute raved about it. From the description of the opening sequences, I and many others were also incredibly excited about how it was sounding. It looks like WB just was never really big on the project to begin with and probably had nightmares of Dolph Lundgren and Courteney Cox haunting them non-stop.

Aside from nightmares, the two huge guillotines were this: WB had a list of directors they wanted, including Bryan Singer and Doug Liman, both of whom passed it up. Also, the main man who brought Grayskull to Warner, Navid McIIhargey, actually left for New Regency, which is a good way to get a project snuffed out.

After drifting in and out of production hell for a few years, it appears that Voltron: Defender of the Universe will be moving forward once again. Relativity Media is in negotiations to back the movie behind Fox’s New Regency with Mark Gordon and Jordan Wynn attached to produce.

Apparently one of the big problems was how much it would cost (obviously; it’s freakin’ Voltron) and that’s what kept holding it back. The solution: green screen! But of course. In order to have a more “moderate” budget, the studios will take the path paved by 300 and hope to achieve Transformers success. This decision is catching a lot of eyes and has a lot of people scratching their collective heads, but eh, we’ll see what happens I guess.

Personally, this project seems cursed from the get-go as it’s always going to be directly in the shadow of Optimus Prime throughout its production and release. But then again, when you’re up against Michael Bay, you always have a shot to come out the victor, I guess.

If you go back a little ways, there was an incredibly positive script review of Grayskull: Masters of the Universe, the new take on the ultra-nostalgic world of He-Man. If you didn’t read about the script review, I suggest you check it out (see A Glimpse Of “˜Grayskull: Masters Of The Universe’).

MTV talked to the film’s screenwriter Justin Marks, who had some things to add; things that might just give you a wet willy if the script review didn’t do it for you.

Marks calls the movie a re-invention, explaining it as similar to (as Latino Review’s El Mayimbe compared it to in his script review) a “Batman Begins-ification” where a character/franchise is completely done over in a much more realistic, much less cheesy way. We saw this in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and this is what is planned for the upcoming remakes for Robocop, Red Sonja, and Conan.