Sydney Sweeney's Alita: Battle Angel Replacement Officially Sets Up A New Era

Published Sep 28, 2026, 12:58 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 movie would always have been a promising prospect, the realization that this project can officially replace the once-promising Alita: Battle Angel franchise makes it all the more exciting. Sydney Sweeney has a strange career trajectory, even by the standards of Hollywood. While Euphoria made the actor a star, the controversial HBO series divided critics throughout its run, and Euphoria’s bizarre series finale did nothing to improve its split reception.

Meanwhile, Sweeney’s movies have been a mixed bag at best. While the rom-com Anyone But You and the campy psychological thriller The Housemaid scored Sweeney massive box office successes, with both low-budget movies becoming blockbuster sleeper hits, her other movie projects have not fared so well. 2024’s Eden and 2025’s Christy were both financial and critical flops, failing to earn a profit while also earning almost universally negative reviews.

Now, Sweeney’s next project, the Netflix action movie Gundam, promises to be her biggest movie since 2024’s comic book catastrophe Madame Web. Based on the 1979 cult anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, Gundam comes from Cold in July director Jim Mickle and co-stars The Recruit’s Noah Centineo alongside Sweeney. The popularity of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise means the movie has the potential to be massive, and Sweeney’s ambitious project could revive an entire sci-fi action subgenre as a result.

Sydney Sweeney’s Gundam Could Give Hollywood A New Mecha Franchise

The story of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise has expanded into a gigantic, sprawling saga over the years, but the original show focuses on a pair of human armies at war with each other in space, utilizing the titular Mobile Suits. Although the Principality of Zeon has fewer members than the larger Earth Federation, their Mecha Suit technology initially allows them to take a definitive lead in the One Year War, before a long, drawn-out stalemate starts.

While Prime Video has a Voltron movie in the works by Skyscraper director Rawson Marshall Thurber, Mickle’s Gundam is still the most promising chance to start a new mecha/giant monster movie renaissance in Hollywood. Right now, viewers only have the Monsterverse and, although Apple TV’s spinoff series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is arguably the greatest Monsterverse title to date, the early end of the Pacific Rim and Alita: Battle Angel franchises have left the subgenre somewhat underpopulated.

While the Mobile Suit Gundam series has many differences from the Transformers movies, both franchises have the potential to offer enthralling action extravaganzas that blend giant robot battles and space-set set pieces. Unfortunately, 2024’s Transformers One underperformed at the box office, as did the preceding year’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. Thus, it is up to Gundam to prove this subgenre can still succeed.

Hollywood Hasn’t Had A Classic Mecha Franchise In Almost Ten Years

Like Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Netflix’s spinoff series Pacific Rim: The Black is arguably the most accomplished and compelling entry into its franchise, but it is also a small-screen spinoff that garnered a fraction of the attention earned by the franchise’s movies. Thus, as great as Pacific Rim: The Black is, it is still entirely fair to say that after the box office disappointment of 2018’s Pacific Rim: Uprising and the lengthy wait for a sequel to 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel, Hollywood doesn’t have an ongoing major mecha franchise.

Luckily, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise is already one of the biggest franchises on the planet, with over 80 movies, TV shows, and OVAs to its name, as well as countless toys, games, and pieces of tie-in spinoff media. The existing popularity of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, combined with Sweeney’s star power, should be enough to make Gundam the sort of unambiguously massive hit that Hollywood needs to bring back mecha movies.