It director to helm Warner Bros.’ Attack on Titan movie

Andy Muschietti, the director of last summer’s box office smash It, will direct a feature film version of Attack on Titan, one of Japan’s most popular manga and anime series, Variety reported on Monday night.

The series follows a group of teenagers desperately trying to defend their walled city from a killer race of giants who want to eat the city’s inhabitants. Attack on Titan is written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama. The series is massively popular in Japan, with the second highest manga sales in the country for the first half of 2018. In fact, the series proved so popular that in 2015 Japanese production company Toho Pictures released its own live-action version, though reception was mostly mixed.

Attack on Titan will be Muschietti’s third film for Warner Bros. which produced last year’s It: Volume 1 and will produce It: Volume 2, which is due out next year. Muschietti’s first It film proved to be a massive success, pulling in the highest gross for any R rated horror film ever. Production for the new Attack on Titan film will likely begin shortly after Muschietti finishes work on the It sequel, which is due out on Sept. 6, 2019.