Sony's not exactly Marvel here. IMHO, Marvel is really the only studio out there right now that can turn untested or older and seemingly irrelevant properties in the marketplace like this into major blockbusters.
Yeah Paramount had success with Transformers in 2007 and turned it into a billion dollar movie franchise. But that success has now clearly waned in 2017 with The Last Knight.
Too bad Marvel Studios doesn't have the film rights for GI Joe, all the Hasbro/IDW properties, Thundercats, He-Man and Robotech
Also, you can't do Robotech for cheap. Look at what's happening right now at Sony with projects like The Dark Tower. $60 million budget and 95-minute running time.
Robotech, for all its flaws, is an interstellar space epic. It's a scifi space opera. It has giant robots, giant alien monsters called the Zentraedi, a giant interstellar battleship the SDF-1 that can transform into a giant robot; the inside of which is a mobile city that is home to all the stranded civilians of Macross City. Robot mecha battles. Plus there's the weirder concepts like protoculture and such. And then you have other alien races like the Invid and the Robotech Masters. You have large scale battles with these high-tech mecha and the Zentraedi fleet both on the ground of planets and in space. Not to mention a fairly large cast of characters, even if you focus on the main central cast.
You can't do a movie on that for nothing less than $150 million.
Pacific Rim - a movie about a paramilitary defense force fighting giant monsters with giant robots on Earth cost $180 million
Edge of Tomorrow - a movie about a paramilitary defense force that uses armored exo-suits to fight a race of alien invaders that can control time cost $178 million
Transformers - the first movie cost $150 million in 2007 and certain crew members took a pay cut so it could get made on a more reasonable budget.
So if you want to translate just SOME of those above elements I mentioned, it will not be cheap. But best of luck to Muschietti to give it a shot.
Just remember, none of these reports mean that Tom Rothman is going to give him the green light unless he likes his pitch and the budget.