It's official, ladies and gentlemen. According to Variety, Warner Bros. has finally got the rights to work on its live-action movie version of the manga serial Bleach, and as planned, Peter Segal of Get Smart fame will be producing this movie, Teaming up with him to produce are Masi Oka of Heroes fame and Segal's Callahan Filmworks partner Michael Ewing while Dan Mazeau of Wrath of the Titans fame will write. However, a released ate isn't yet decided.
Look, I understand some of you reading this are so used to getting angry about a Japanese work of fiction being adapted for American cinema/television, but when considering that most anime/manga that are set in Japan or at least enter around protagonal Japanese individuals, the fictional characters of such who have Japanese names always resemble none-asian races: Chad in Bleach looking Mexican, Ichigo Kurosaki of the same manga looking caucasian, and Yoruichi looking African American. It should be easy to do a live-action Bleach with an American twist and have a multiethnic cast to act and look the parts as long 1) there's a middle ground between keeping in what's Bleach is about and maintaining a western flavour to meet tastes of mainstream North American viewers (so as to avoid repeating the tragedy of those who worked on 2008's Speed Racer), and 2) some character names are to be replaced with names non-manga readers in North American can pronounce. Heck, Power Rangers (though based on a Japanese live-action) managed to balance between maintaing defining concepts of the adapted Japanese source material and maintaining a western flavour and ended being up one of the most popular sci-fi franchises of the U.S. while The Magnificent Seven (1960) presented a westernzied take on the Seven Samurai tale and still remains legendary to this day, despite focusing on cowboys instead of samurai. To conclude, Bleach can work out as a U.S. movie. It's just a matter of how the cards are played right when deciding on how to tweak things up with an American twist.
9:41 PM Canada EST.
