Sydney Sweeney's Live-Action Anime Adaptation On Netflix Will Make Transformers Look Small

Published Aug 22, 2026, 1:02 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While Sydney Sweeney’s upcoming Netflix anime adaptation might feel like Transformers, the movie is part of a franchise far larger than even that sci-fi blockbuster series. Sydney Sweeney’s screen career to date has been remarkably varied for an emerging actor. Of course, this hasn’t always been a good thing for the A-list star, who has navigated as many high-profile flops as she has critical and commercial hits. Most recently, Sweeney’s 2025 psychological thriller The Housemaid became a gargantuan box office hit for herself and co-star Amanda Seyfried, earning a staggering $400 million at the box office despite going up against the epic blockbuster sequel Avatar: Fire & Ash with its December release. The movie, from A Simple Favor director Paul Feig, also earned a rare accolade as critics largely agreed it was better than its source material, the campy Freida McFadden novel of the same name. However, before Sweeney could get too comfortable, her R-rated boxing biopic Christy flopped disastrously, and although critics called her performance strong, the movie’s reviews weren’t much better than its box office on the whole. This, combined with the mixed reception of Euphoria’s bizarre series finale, leaves Sweeney in the strange position of being one of the biggest box office stars of 2026 without only a few major acclaimed projects to her name. That’s where Netflix’s upcoming anime adaptation Gundam hopes to change things. Gundam Will Be Familiar To Transformers Fans, But It's So Much Bigger Than That Co-starring Noah Centineo of the To All The Boys franchise, Gundam will be executive-produced by Sweeney herself. The anime adaptation is based on 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam, an immersive space opera with enough lore to rival Henry Cavill’s upcoming Warhammer 40,000 series. Mobile Suit Gundam is set in the Universal Century 0079, where one rogue group of space colonies begins a war with the Earth Federation by utilizing cutting-edge Mobile Suits. A weaponized mecha-suit, these robotic enhancements initially allow the group of colonies, known as the Principality of Zeon, to dominate in this interstellar war against the Earth federation. Then, after a massive swathe of the human population is wiped out, a stalemate begins, and the story of the series starts in earnest. What follows is one of the largest media franchises of all time, with more than 80 shows, movies, tie-ins, video games, OVA, spinoffs, manga, and toys. All told, the Gundam franchise is one of the biggest in the history of mass media, with a cultural reach and economic acumen that has led some commentators to compare the series to Star Wars. If Sweeney’s upcoming Gundam movie can tap into this market, the franchise could become huge, but, for Western viewers, the closest access point would be the Transformers franchise, with its giant robot wars in space, its live-action movie adaptations, and its blockbuster scale. Will Netflix's Gundam Beat The Live-Action Anime Adaptation Trap? While the above summary might make it sound like the Transformers and Gundam franchise have a lot in common, there are also plenty of major differences between them. While Transformers centers on conflicts between alien robots who are sentient, autonomous extraterrestrials, Gundam instead focuses on human-piloted mech suits that have no minds of their own. In practice, this means Gundam is as much a space opera like Battlestar Galactica as it is an outlandish story of interstellar war. Of course, regardless of the distinctions between the two franchises in terms of plot, the real question is whether Sweeney’s upcoming movie will be able to break the curse faced by so many failed live-action adaptations of popular manga and anime franchises. For every success story like Netflix’s One Piece, there are disastrous flops like the streaming service’s Cowboy Bebop. Thus, only time will tell if Sydney Sweeney’s Gundam can replicate the mainstream success of the Transformers movies. Director Jim Mickle Producers Linda Moran, Cale Boyter, Matthew Jenkins, Noah Centineo, Sydney Sweeney, Makoto Asanuma, Ali Mendes, Naohiro Ogata