Joe Russo, co-director and producer of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame with his brother Anthony, recently shared some updates on a few of the highly-anticipated projects they currently have in development at AGBO. Speaking with Collider’s Steve Weintraub in an exclusive conversation about the upcoming Netflix movie Extraction, Russo teased some details about the current status of their live-action adaptation of the 1977 animated series Battle of the Planets, as well as an animated series based on Magic: The Gathering for Netflix and a series adaptation of Grimjack for Amazon.

“It’s not going to be a direct adaptation of the series,” Russo said of Battle of the Planets. “It’s going to be our own story that we tell surrounding a group of genetically altered kids who are involved in a space war… That could take months of gestating, and trying to figure out what the new mythology is. And then we commit that to a bible, and then from that bible we do some artwork as exploration, and once we have artwork that we’re inspired by we then commit that to a script. So we’re in the bible phase for Battle of the Planets at the moment.”

Battle of the Planets was an Americanized version of a Japanese cartoon series titled Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, about a team of young fighters called G-Force tasked with defending Earth from intergalactic enemies. It was not dissimilar from Voltron, in that G-Force flew one giant spaceship that contained several smaller, equally righteous vehicles. It’ll be interesting to see what the Russos’ take on the series ends up being, but blockbuster space battles seem firmly within their wheelhouse.

Meanwhile, Grimjack, based on the sci-fi / fantasy comic book series about a trans-dimensional mercenary, is currently in the script phase, with Russo calling the script “fantastic” and indicating that it has been submitted to Amazon for notes. Finally, he reveals that Magic: The Gathering, the animated series based on the popular collectible card game published by Wizards of the Coast, is also in the script phase. However, he notes that animation has a much longer prep period than live-action projects, which means we probably won’t see the series anytime soon. Check out Russo’s comments in the video below.

Finally, here’s Joe Russo talking about a possible Community movie, here’s what Russo had to say about Tom Holland’s work in Cherry, and here’s his update on the next three films he’s doing with his brother Anthony.

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