Perhaps one of the most risky activities a filmmaker in Hollywood can face is adapt a prestigious manga. The task has all the ballots to end up transformed into an indefensible disaster like ‘Dragonball Evolution’, but even when the results are as estimable as those of ‘Speed Racer’ or ‘Alita: Battle Angel’, you can’t help but savor the taste of disappointment.
unoiled machines
In the bag of this type of production to forget, both for the public and for the responsible studio, we cannot forget to include ‘Ghost in the Shell: The soul of the machine’; the feature film with which Rupert Sanders tried to transfer to live action, and unsuccessfully, the undisputed genius of both the 1994 anime directed by mamoru oshii like from the manga of masamune shirow.
To do this, the director of ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ and the people at Paramount decided to have a mostly Western cast to play the main characters, including a Scarlett Johannson who became the focus of all the accusations about what it looked like a case of whitewashing from manual.
This controversy buried the good work of Sanders and his team in terms of production design and the visual treatment of a film that, on the other hand, was unable to come even close to the philosophical grounds of the original material, which successfully explores the identity conflict of its protagonist in a tremendously technologically advanced world in which flesh, metal and real-time information highways coexist in a single body.
The film, budgeted at 110 million dollars -not counting advertising costs-, failed miserably at the box office and was a great financial setback for the company, which lost, according to experts, a sum between 60 and 100 million. The reason, according to Paramount, had nothing to do with the creative aspect, but with the aforementioned racial controversy.
That ‘Ghost in the Shell’ debuted with a discreet 19 million dollars that placed it in third position during its first weekend in theaters, and that it ended its international tour with a disappointing total of 170 million, as explained by Kyle Davies, chief of domestic distribution of the study, was try to please as many viewers as possible.
“You have a movie that is very important to the fans because it’s based on a Japanese animated movie. So you’re always trying to thread the needle, between respecting the source material and making a movie for a mass audience. It’s challenging, but clearly The reviews didn’t help.”
That happened by keeping the Japanese identities of the Major and Kuze and assigning the roles to two interpreters such as Johansson and Michael Pitt, and maintain age rating for ages 13+. Two decisions that ended up weighing down a project that has already been looked at with suspicion since its announcement, and that makes many of us tremble at the idea that the ‘Akira’ made in hollywood already running.
If you want to give ‘Ghost in the Shell’ a second chance, it has just joined the Netflix catalog.
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