Warner Brothers is persistent. You have to give them that. After the year long debacle that was their live-action Akira, now cooling on ice for the foreseeable future, the studio is dead set on getting a manga into theaters somehow. They've decided to take a different route this time, but with no less popular a property, as Variety reports Warner Brothers has scooped up the film rights to Tite Kubo's Bleach.
First debuting in the weekly pages of the manga anthology, Shonen Jump in 2001, Bleach follows Ichiko Kurosaki, a young man with the ability to see spirits, and gains the ability to battle malevolent souls known as Hollows. Bleach has proven to be enormously successful, with over 70 million copies of the manga sold in Japan, and the anime currently in it's 16th season of production. It's basically been adapted into every media format you can think of, spawning video games, four anime movies, and even musicals. Bleach is everywhere.
Here's where the problem comes in, as fans of Bleach are probably going to take issue with the creative talent involved. Dan Mazeau(Wrath of the Titans) will pen the screenplay, with Peter Segal on board to produce and possibly direct. Segal is the genius behind such Adam Sandler hits as The Longest Yard and 50 First Dates. Feeling optimistic yet?
It's easy to make the Akira comparison here, but Bleach should be considerably less of a financial headache. The question is who will the studio get to star in this thing? Ichigo is always ranked right there as one of the most popular manga/anime characters, so casting him is going bring some heavy scrutiny no matter what. But Warner Brothers has been working on this deal for nearly two years, and have been looking at Segal to take charge the whole time, so they must have some sort of a plan. Right?
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