This steampunk thing seems to be slowly growing on the geek crowd. It's not exactly popular, but the genre has gained a lot of ... steam (sorry) over the past decade. However, while we have had some steampunk and steampunk-ish movies come out over the past five or six years -- Steamboy and 9 are the first to come to mind -- they seem to have all remained niche-y. Now Paramount is looking to make a steampunk-ish movie with a broad appeal, and if you need someone to make something popular, why not turn to the guy who made Star Trek cool? That's right: J.J. Abrams.

Heat Vision reports that Abrams will be acting as producer on a film adaptation of a "graphic novel-picture book hybrid" called Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel. Boilerplate tells the following story, as summarized by the robot's official website:

Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

Built in a small Chicago laboratory, Boilerplate was a prototype soldier built for "preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations." Although it was the only such prototype, Boilerplate was eventually able to exercise its proposed function in several combat actions.

Boilerplate embarked on a series of expeditions to demonstrate its abilities, the most ambitious being a voyage to Antarctica. Boilerplate is one of history's great ironies, a technological milestone that remains largely unknown.

Boilerplate also fought in The Spanish-American War, the Japanese-Russian War, and World War I. So, yeah, the robot's been around.

I'm not familiar with the work myself, but the concept sounds fun. It will also be interesting to see how well a steampunk robot translates to live-action cinema. I can't recall any movies that have tried that before. If there's anyone who can make it work, though, it's probably Abrams.