Night At The Museum director Shawn Levy has been enlisted by DreamWorks to bring futuristic boxing movie Real Steel to the screen. Set in a sanitised future where human boxing has been outlawed and remotely-operated robots slug it out in the ring, it follows a father and son's attempts to win the 'Bot Boxing Championship.
Levy was tapped up by Steven Spielberg for the pugilist project when Peter Berg ended talks. Levy describes Real Steel as "a movie filled with mechanical warriors, [but] at its core it's an incredibly human story." So not Transformers 2, basically.
Tone-wise, the choice of Levy (and the whole 'Bot Boxing' thing) suggests a light-hearted rather than Raging Bull**-meets-Philip K. Dick vibe. He's been quietly building a rep as a specialist in family-friendly comedies, with the Night At The Museum **franchise and Cheaper By The Dozen under his belt, and The Pink Panther presumably buried in his back garden. He's also recently wrapped the very-promising-sounding Steve Carell/Tina Fey comedy Date Night.
John Gatins (Coach Carter) provided the most recent draft of Real Steel's script, while Robert Zemeckis, a man who knows one or two things about futuristic worlds, will lend his eye as exec-producer under his ImageMovers banner. Real Steel is expected to go into production in 2010.