America Takes Interest in Bebopping Cowboys

IF Magazine has the scoop that producer Edwin Stoff is working on a live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop for Fox. I don’t know if anime fans are excited or terrified, but it really doesn’t matter, mainly because there’s only a slight chance of it ever getting made?1) because it’s a long way from making a treatment to a full greenlight, and 2) when the live-action Dragonball move tanks, I’m positive this will be put on some back shelf at the Fox offices somewhere. Still, Stoff is already trying to appease fans:

?I have such an enormous admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern is going to be a real degree of faithfulness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of genres, and so on and so forth,? he says. ?When I met with them in Japan, one of the first things that I brought up was the experience that we had on A SCANNER DARKLY, and how hard we worked to remain faithful to Philip K. Dick, and that was our big concern here.?

On the plus side, Bebop is one of the best candidates for a live-action anime movie. It’s reasonably stand-alone, so the story should be easily adaptable into a feature film; it’s very popular, having run on Adult Swim for the last five years or so; it’s more adult oriented than most popular anime, which means it should be able to attract a decent mainstream audience if promoted right; and last but not least, it’s got a very accessible, American audience-friendly sci-fi setting and characters? totally unlike Dragonball, which is so going to tank. But I still think we’ll be seeing those long-rumored adaptations of Akira and Lupin the 3rd before Bebop, which is to say in about a jillion years or so.