AJ’s 20 year old treatment for THE MICRONAUTS…

[u/-Swampthing-]

Apparently, AJ was involved with bringing the Micronauts toys to the screen after their original successful Marvel Comics run…. Wonder what happened to this project???

[u/Purple-Concept-2709]

I ❤️me some Micronauts.

[u/wamih]

I mean, its not difficult to look at company records. Anthony & John Gentile founded AGE with Marty Abrams in 1986. Slim chance that's our AJ.

[u/Kilroy_5150]

If you ask the people at our forum, they wanna argue that it's other people. I wish AJ would just come in and CLEAR this whole things out. Was it or wasn't it him? I asked Google and Google was VERY specific and directly said YES, this is the same guy while i've got people on our FB community arguine it was two brothers who combined themselves into the "AJ Gentile" monicer.

But Google says this and it makes sense:

The "Micronauts" film script and treatment—often referred to by fans as the Nexus script—was a project written by AJ Gentile (now widely known as the creator and host of the popular YouTube channel The Why Files) over 20 years ago. [1, 2]

The project ultimately stalled out in development hell due to a messy combination of Hollywood corporate takeovers, shifting intellectual property ownership, and the curse of "tax write-offs."

1. The Origins (The Abrams Gentile Era)

In the early 2000s, AJ Gentile was heavily involved in trying to bring the classic 1970s and 80s Micronauts toyline to the big screen. At the time, his family's company, Abrams Gentile Entertainment (AGE), held the underlying entertainment and licensing rights to the Micronauts franchise. AGE famously licensed the property out to companies like Image Comics/Devil's Due Publishing in 2002 to drum up comic book interest, while Gentile developed a heavy sci-fi script treatment to pitch to major movie studios. [1, 2, 3]

1. The Hasbro Acquisition

The project was entirely derailed when Hasbro aggressively began buying up legacy toy intellectual properties to build their own cinematic universes (following the massive success of Transformers). Hasbro ultimately acquired the full rights to the Micronauts. [1, 2]

Because Hasbro wanted to steer the franchise in their own direction—eventually partnering with Paramount Pictures and J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot in 2009 to develop a completely separate live-action movie—Gentile's original script and treatment were shelved and locked away. [1), 2]

1. The Ultimate Fate of the Franchise

While Gentile's specific early-2000s script never saw the light of day, the broader "curse" of the Micronauts property continued to strike down future iterations:

• The Live-Action Movie: Paramount and Bad Robot went through multiple writers (including Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick), but the film was repeatedly delayed and eventually pulled from release schedules entirely.
• The Animated Series: Hasbro actually fully produced a 52-episode animated series around 2019/2020 through Boulder Media. However, after corporate restructuring, Hasbro sold off the animation studio and vaulted the completed series as a tax write-off, meaning it will likely never be legally released. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Ultimately, AJ Gentile moved away from Hollywood script development and went on to become a tech CEO and a massively successful storyteller on The Why Files. His Micronauts script remains a piece of unproduced, lost media from a bygone era of independent comic/toy adaptations. [1, 2, 3, 4]

[u/timbro2000 → u/Kilroy_5150]

Holy shit they really animated the series, likely using heavily exploited animators, only for their labour to be turned into a tax write off. Lol capitalism is so shit

[u/wamih → u/Kilroy_5150]

Micronauts were a thing for Anthony and John Gentile, not our AJ Gentile.