"Cowboy Beebop" Goes Live Action

One of my favorite anime series, and what many consider to be one of the very best, is being brought to live action. I'm currently of two minds about this. Like most things that anime presents, the film could be beautiful. But as we know, live action adaptations don't always go as planned, and when it's 20th Century Fox behind things, it's either all or nothing.

Producer Erwin Stoff announced it recently:

“I’m developing 'Cowboy Beebop' for Fox, but doing it as a live-action film, so I’m working on that at the moment,” said Stoff.“I’m really excited to be working on it, and it’s in the really early stages. We just signed it the other day. 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. 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.”

Well he sounds sincere... Stoff's track record isn't exactly respectable, but it's not horrible either. He did have a hand in "The Matrix," "The Devil's Advocate" and "Constantine." However it's going to take more than just remaining faithful to the source material to make a good "Cowboy Beebop" movie. I'll judge further when more comes along, but Stoff better fight for one of the finest writers in the business if he wants to keep fans happy.

"Cowboy Beebop." An amazing show. I'm not sure if they should risk tainting its great name. Well... There's no choice but to try now. Best of luck to you Stoff. Don't f$#^ this up.