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True Grit Producer in Live-Action Star Blazers Talks
posted on by Egan Loo
Skydance Productions, the company that financed half of the recent American film True Grit, is in talks to acquire the live-action film rights to Star Blazers. Star Blazers is the dubbed and partly rewritten adaptation of Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto's Space Battleship Yamato space opera anime franchise.
According to the movie news website Deadline, Skydance head David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison) and Josh Klein would produce if the deal is completed, and Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, The Wolverine) would write the screenplay.
The Yamato franchise began with the first Space Battleship Yamato television series in 1974. The titular spaceship Yamato is built from the remains of the World War II battleship of the same name to protect Earth from extraterrestrial threats. During the next nine years, the television anime spawned two television sequels, two video projects, and six films including 2009's Space Battleship Yamato Resurrection.
A live-action film remake of the original Space Battleship Yamato anime opened in Japan last December. There was a previous attempt at an American live-action film adaptation by the company BenderSpink (The Ring) in 2006.
Update: More background information added.
Update 2: Deadline posted an image of the Soyokaze, a ship from the unrelated television anime series The Irresponsible Captain Tylor.
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