Boilerplate is the shiny metal Zelig, and now JJ Abrams is working to bring the robot's story to the bigscreen.

Credit: Abrams Image Publishing

This one sounds great.

Until today, I was totally unaware of "Boilerplate," which is one of these new-media projects that evolved from a website to a book and now, thanks to the interest of JJ Abrams and Bad Robot, a movie.

Here's what Borys Kit and Jay Hernandez had to say when they broke the story on the Heat Vision Blog this afternoon:

Paramount has picked up rights to “Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel,” a graphic novel-picture book hybrid by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett, the creators of comic book series “Heartbreakers,” for an adaptation to be produced by Abrams and his banner.

"Boilerplate" purports to tell the story of the world’s first robot, who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt and Lawrence of Arabia, journeyed to the South Pole and was involved in the silent movie business before disappearing on the battlefields of World War I.

The book tells Boilerplate’s story by inserting the character into pictures drawn in the style of the age.

Okay, first of all... a robot who rode with Lawrence of Arabia?  Why not just call the movie, "Drew McWeeny's Biggest Nerd Dream"?  Because that sounds crazy-awesome.  And looking at the official website for Boilerplate or watching the trailer they cut for the book or reading the various reactions to the character from the last ten years of its existence, I'm impressed by just how deep a wellspring of source material this is.  This could turn out to be the "Zelig" of robot movies, and something we haven't really seen before.

Check out the trailer for yourself:

See what I mean?  That's on no real budget, and already that looks cooler than a lot of giant budget genre films I could name from the last few years.

This one's on our radar now, and I certainly hope to bring you much more about it as the film comes together in the future.

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