Attempts to translate anime to film however are anything but new, with Japan having long since gotten the jump on America by several decades with plenty attempts at adapting the country’s most prolific cultural export to the silver screen. The box-office success or failure of Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell may prove to be an inadvertent weathervane of sorts, pointing to either the continued support or premature mothballing of this nascent string of live-action productions. Not to mention Warner Bros.’ long postponed and much maligned attempt at an American Akira remake, whose nebulous production status looms heavy over fans of the 1988 original like some vague, ominous threat.

and Lionsgate respectively in the process of optioning rights to a remake of Attack on Titan and a live-action Naruto movie, it looks as though a new wave of anime and manga adaptations will become the latest trend in American entertainment. With Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel slated for release next summer, Adam Wingard’s Death Note remake premiering via Netflix in August, James Wan’s Robotech gearing up for pre-production, and Warner Bros. After all, with superhero and comic movies dominating the zeitgeist of mainstream entertainment and earning some of the highest-grossing turnouts of the past two decades, why shouldn’t the same be true for anime movies?Īt least, that’s what some of Hollywood’s biggest studios are thinking, as evidenced by the announcement of not only Ghost in the Shell but several other anime-to-live-action productions just within the past year. The thought process and motivations behind such productions seems easy enough to grasp. Allegations of whitewashing and a general disregard for the source material have dogged the film’s production for over the past year, raising concerns in the ongoing debate as to whether American filmmakers are equipped at all to the task of adapting foreign cultural properties with respect to their origins.

Much has been said already about the new live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell.

Live action anime movies