Its the age of remakes and reboots and there is a strong reason why Hollywood is investing so much in nostalgia and established franchises. However, the anime movie, Your Name, was a surprise. Is not everyday that an anime movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars unless is Dragon Ball or Studio Ghibli.
Your Name (Kimi No Nawa), was produced with a budget of $2.7 million dollars. Which is the Average budget for a good American cartoon and much higher for a 20 to 30 minute anime episode. So as you can see the budget for this anime movie was really not that big.
Your Name then went on to rake in $300 Million world wide ( most of the ticket sales came from USA).
It was so super successful that Hollywood decided to make a live action movie of Your Name- Kimi No Nawa. Keep in mind that Hollywood has already been investing highly into anime (especially Netflix).
But aside from it being turned into a live action adaptation like many franchises are today, the Your Name live action movie will have western leads.
Why is Hollywood replacing the Japanese Leads
Before answering the question lets go over the creators of this live action project.
Marc Webb who was the director of the Amazing Spider Man movie, got his hands on the live action project for your name. As of 2017 the film companies Paramount and Bad Robot have acquired the rights for the live action of Your Name from Toho. In case you did not know, Toho handles the distribution of films in Japan.
Good news for those apprehensive anime fans out there. Genki Kawamura,the original producer of the anime movie will be joining the project as well. This means that the original creators are okay with the replacement of the Japanese leads.
Eric Heisserer, who wrote the script for Netflix’s Bird Box, will also be help with the script for this live action project. Now interestingly enough, according to NextShark, which is an Asian news outlet in America, said that the producers of Your Name want to see a “white washed American version,” of the animated movie.
That is right, you read that correctly. This is not made up, this is not fake American news, this is the real deal. Click here to read the article on NextShark.
According to the article, they producers said, “if we wanted to make a Japanese live action movie of Your Name, then we would have done it.” Fair enough and very honest. It makes sense because if you remember, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, was both an anime and live action in Japan.
If you do the math as to why Japanese producers want to see an American live action of Your name, it is for two years.
- They know that Americans are way better at making live action movies (after seeing the success of the superhero movies) and they prefer to have American film companies do it.
- They want to profit from a world wide audience which is why Hollywood is making so many remakes and reboots.
Besides a few titles, live action adaptations of anime from Japanese film makers have not been the best. However, there is higher confidence with American film producers because, American producer have more money to make a high budget film.
If you take a look at the Avengers movies, each money took $200 million or more to make. Overseas companies don’t usually put that much money into a project like that. As said before, Your Name only took $2.7 million to make. So it was a good decision.
What does this mean for the Your Name Live Action Movie
Worst case scenario, if it ends up in the wrong hands, if will end up like the Netflix Death Note live action. However, from the details above, the original producer,Genki Kawamura, will be joining the team to make sure it goes well. Thank god.
So it is already in good hands. So long as the original producers are supervising the project it usually ends up being really good. George RR Martin was supervising Game of Thrones and the show turned out well (until season 8 of course).
Most likely the story will take place in America rather than parts of Japan and Tokyo. I am guessing that they will move the story to New York City. The main characters live in Rural areas of Japan. They can use parts of upper New York where the characters can live.
What about the meteor?
the meteor had destroyed a village in the original story. That is going to be tricky because in the movie, the location of the meteor worked well because of how Japanese islands and landscapes are. The location of the meteor in the American version is going to be tricky and this is the part where the movie could go wrong in many ways.
However, lets wait and see. Remember, the original creator is part of this project.
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