After 19 years since it’s release in 1989 someone has finally decided to secure the rights to produce a movie based of the original movie and manga. DreamWorks has finally secured the rights to adapt the Japanese manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell into a 3D live-action feature film. But it seems they weren’t the only ones who were chasing after the rights to produce a film based off the animated movie. Both Universal and Sony were also in discussions to secure the rights, till Steven Spielberg stepped in personally and took matters into his own hands.

And of course since we are talking about Steven here, it ended up in the hands of his company Dreamworks. Spielberg says that Ghost in the Shell is one of his favorite stories and says that it is:

“A genre that has arrived and we enthusiastically welcome it to DreamWorks.”

Pretty ironic though as Warner Brothers has secured th

e rights to produce one of the other legends of Anime movies called “Akira”, coincidence maybe. ? Street Kings screenwriter Jamie Moss has been hired to write the adaptation. Ex-Marvel CEO Avi Arad and Steven Paul, who originally brought the project to the studio, will both produce. A director has not been announced yet. A production schedule has not been announced as of yet but my suspicions tell me they are going to either release it before Akira or shortly afterwards.

I wonder if this will spawn some healthy competition between the two rivals and hopefully mean a better end product for us the fans. I have a great interest in GITS series, and I will reserve my judgment on this till I see the final product.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Anime, Larch. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.