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Guillermo del Toro Wants to Make Live-Action Gantz

Director Guillermo del Toro (Pacific Rim, Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy) held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) thread on Reddit on Friday. A Reddit user asked, "is there any manga or anime series that you are familiar with, that you would be interested in adapting into movie if given a chance?" Del Toro replied that he "would love to adapt live-action GANTZ."

The director's full response is as follows:

Well, I am a huge anime and manga fan, as is my daughter. In fact, I have an entire cabin in my office in the garden dedicated just to manga and anime, where I keep my books and my movies. I have never seen Evangelion, I love the designs and am very familiar with the designs of the EVA robots and Angels, but I have never actually sat down to see the series. Some people pointed out - I don't know if Travis who wrote Pacific Rim saw Evangelion - they saw the gel that connects the people to the robots, I came up with that myself, without seeing Evangelion. I however fully acknowledge the influence of Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Tetsujin 28-go, Space Giants, Mazinger Z, and many many other anime that I have watched and enjoy. I love very much the work of Osamu Tezuka, whose work influenced me growing up as a child, and I love quite a bit of the work of Mamoru Oshii, Katsuhiro Ōtomo, Satoshi Kon (big big time, whom I think was the finest narrator in anime other than Miyazaki and Takahata).

I also love the work Jiro Taniguchi, which I find incredibly contemplative and meditative,highly influential for me are the sculptures of Mirasawa, and the horror stories of Junji Ito, whom I met on my last trip to Japan. He was very very shy, and I kept slapping him on the back, which was not very Japanese. Junji Ito is the only author of comics that has scared the shit out of me. When the shark takes the stairs in GYO, grows the mechanical crab legs chasing them up the stairs, I literally threw away the comic and yelled "NO!" i was so absolutely scared.

I also think that I am very influenced by Japanese game designers. I am friends and a big friend of Hideo Kojima, and I have been lucky enough to be friends with Otomo-San. But the series I think would be FANTASTIC to adapt, but I would love to adapt live-action GANTZ. I love the books, I love the book i don't know if you're familiar with it, called BLAME - it's a really surreal, beautiful book, but I don't know if you know it. But it's written by Tsutomu Nihei. And I love the work of Katsuya Terada. But I tried my best as an anime fan to try to do the first live action anime movie with Pacific Rim. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to achieve an almost superpure color palette of super-saturated colors. I was hoping to make the movie feel as dynamic and as vibrant as anime.

Two live-action film adaptations of Hiroya Oku's Gantz science-fiction action manga premiered in Japan in 2011. The Cinema Today website reported in 2010 that producers had already received inquiries about remake rights from the United States and the United Kingdom before the films premiered.

Del Toro is also planning a possible HBO television series adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's suspense manga Monster. Del Toro submitted a pilot script to the HBO network in May 2013.