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NEWS: Warner Develops Live-Action Film of Tite Kubo's Bleach Manga

Poor Warner are you really this desperate for a good genre franchise?

Yes Harry Potter is over and the Chris Nolan Batman series ends this year and Hobbit only takes you into 2013 but surely there is something better than licensing japanese anime and manga series like say using more DC comics characters in films ("cough Green Lantern cough") oh right.

@ Mawdryn

Hasn't the whitewashed adaptation of Akira not being strongly received well by the fans that it has forced WB to cancel the project all together?

This could actually be a fun movie with the potential to become a series of movies. Yes, it's going to be Americanized, but that's kinda why they do these movies--to adapt them for a large American or Western audience that generally is unaware of the propety's real origins. Outside of the nichey anime community, the vast majority of people have never even heard of Bleach before.

Once again, how come Hollywood didn't adapt a popular non-Asian centered anime/manga series like Fullmetal Alchemist yet? The series has a pretty good significant Western following due to both shows airing on Adult Swim, the characters and the settings in the series are already Western to begin with so there's no worry of whitewashing and only worry if the live action adaptation will do justice to the original. Why hasn't Hollywood picked that series to adapt to live action yet? It just baffles me.

Soul Eater would also make a pretty good series to adapt for Hollywood to make into live action. The series is already set in America and the cast of characters is pretty big and diverse. Story will be difficult but not impossible to adjust and I think Soul Eater will be seen as the weird sister series to Harry Potter.

Mawdryn wrote:

This could actually be a fun movie with the potential to become a series of movies. Yes, it's going to be Americanized, but that's kinda why they do these movies--to adapt them for a large American or Western audience that generally is unaware of the propety's real origins. Outside of the nichey anime community, the vast majority of people have never even heard of Bleach before.

And how often do non-anime fans go to see movies based on anime properties?

To be clear, I am not asking if such people exist but rather is it as profitable as regular ol' movies based on generic Western plots. The targetting of non-anime fans and people unaware of the property doesn't work. I think it's about to give up that line a reasoning, Hollywood simply does bad anime adaptations.

@ Mawdryn

Along side Voltron, how come those big giant robot titles are still in development hell? Hasn't the Transformers trilogy, and Real Steal has proven to Hollywood that having movies with giant robots beat the crap out of each other is making big money with audiences? I take it's because of how they would handle the budget and CG because I bet that the first movie of them alone would be close to $200 million.

Also, we're not talking about the Americanization of anime like the titles you mentioned,

we're talking about anime titles who are already non-Asian in the originals as well like my stated examples of Fullmetal Alchemist, Soul Eater, Hellsing, and Chrono Crusade which has already established non-Asian main leads in anime from the very begining.

Talking about those titles, do you think they will appeal to North American audiences if they were turned to live action? I personally believe that with careful tinkering, I feel the they would make definitely make good crossover appeal to non-fans.