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Hollywood's Tiger & Bunny Film Moves Forward With Global Road, Akiva Goldsman
posted on by Egan Loo
Bandai Namco Pictures announced on Tuesday that Global Road Entertainment and Weed Road Pictures are new partners in the proposed live-action Hollywood film adaptation of Sunrise's Tiger & Bunny anime. Ellen Shanman (Everything Nice, Liv) is continuing to write the screenplay. Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, and President Erica Huggins of Imagine Entertainment are still producing the project with Bandai Namco Pictures' Masayuki Ozaki. Joining them are Global Road Entertainment's President of Worldwide Production Lynn Harris (Warner's Gravity, Man of Steel) and Weed Road Pictures' Akiva Goldsman.
Donald Tang founded Global Road Entertainment in 2017 as the consolidation of IM Global and Open Road Films under his Tang Media Partners company. Global Road Entertainment announced at the Berlin International Film Festival in February that it plans to spend around US$1 billion on production over the next three years.
Goldsman not only wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for Howard's A Beautiful Mind film, but he also served as a creative producer on recent Transformers films and as a executive producer on Star Trek: Discovery. Weed Road Pictures is the company that Goldsman founded for his media production efforts. Its projects include Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Hancock, and films that Goldsman wrote such as I Am Legend and Winter's Tale.
The original Tiger & Bunny television anime series centers around heroes for hire — super powered beings known as NEXT who wear sponsor logos while fighting crime on live television.
Keiichi Satou (Karas director, The Big O character/mechanical designer) directed the original anime, and Masafumi Nishida (live-action Kaibutsu-kun) wrote and oversaw the scripts. Manga artist Masakazu Katsura (Video Girl Ai, DNA², I''s, Zetman), a well-known fan of Batman and other superhero comics, created the original character designs.
The 2011 anime series spawned already two anime movies: Tiger & Bunny the Movie: The Beginning in 2012 and Tiger & Bunny The Movie -The Rising- in 2014. Viz released the television series, the films, and the tie-in manga in North America.
Sunrise announced that it will release Double Decker! Doug & Kirill this year as one part of the franchise's new anime series project.
