Paramount’s reportedly spinning up a Beyblade movie with Jerry Bruckheimer

Image: Hasbro

The Beyblade fighting tops will be the subject of a live-action movie, which will be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who has worked on Pirates of the Caribbean and National Treasure. Beyblades are toys that you fling together into an arena using a specialized launcher, hoping to knock your opponent's Beyblade out of the ring or stop it from spinning. The first Manga series came out around the same time as the toys in 1999, some of which have been turned into animated TV shows.

The idea of a Beyblade movie has been floating around for awhile, but the movie is still in early production. Mary Parent, who has worked on projects like Pacific Rim, Detective Pikachu, and Dune, was reported to have been bought the rights to make a live-action Beyblade movie by Paramount. According to Deadline, writers Neil Widener andGavin James have been attached to the project.

If you don't know anything about Beyblade, here's a trailer for one of the recent episodes.

The Lego movies and My Little Pony shows are well-known, and the Transformers movies brought in billions of dollars for Paramount. That doesn't even include media based on card games like Yu-Gi-Oh! It's not an instant recipe for success to base something on a popular toy, and the 2012 film Battleship was hardly a cultural landmark.

It's hard to say if the Beyblade adaption will be worth a try. It's hard to imagine how you could make a movie about top fighting interesting, but the writers won't be the first to try.