Star Wars director JJ Abrams working on live action Your Name remake
- Published
Star Wars director JJ Abrams is set to turn Japanese anime hit Your Name into a live-action Hollywood movie.
Your Name was released in 2016 and has been a huge success, grossing more than £350m worldwide.
It was the fourth highest grossing non-English language film last year and was loved by the critics.
Now JJ's Bad Robot studios will attempt to bring the story to an even wider audience with his remake.
It tells the tale of two school children, Mitsuha and Taki, who live in different parts of Japan and mysteriously swap bodies, fall in love and try to save a town from a comet.
It sounds like it could be confusing, but reviewers praised director Makoto Shinkai story-telling and the film has earned a 98% rating on movie review site Rotten Tomatoes.
As well as body-swap and young love storylines, Your Name deals with an interstellar event in Japan
And JJ Abrams has already assembled a team to work on the film which will keep standards high on his remake.
He will produce it alongside regular collaborator Lindsey Weber, Genki Kawamura (who produced the Japanese version of the movie) and screenwriter Eric Heisserer, who was Oscar nominated for his screenplay for Amy Adams' alien movie, Arrival.
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"The meetings so far have been creatively stimulating with fantastic ideas that no doubt will make for a great movie," says Genki, in a statement about his role in the remake.
"I am greatly honoured to work with these incredible creators in bringing to audiences the Hollywood live-action version of Your Name."
Swapping bodies with boys isn't as much fun as it sounds
Recent anime adaptations, such as Ghost In The Shell starring Scarlett Johansson, have been criticised for "white-washing" the Japanese source material.
A new movie version of comic book Hellboy recently experienced a casting reshuffle when actor after backlash to a Caucasian man being cast as a character who was originally Japanese.
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