Masashi Kishimoto is Involved in Production on Lionsgate, Michael Gracey's Naruto Hollywood Film

[Dervell]

The Naruto and Boruto stage event at the Jump Festa event confirmed on Saturday that Lionsgate and director Michael Gracey (The Greatest Showman) are working on a live-action Hollywood film adaptation of Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto manga.

The event also showed pre-production art, and revealed that Kishimoto himself is involved in the production.

The Tracking Board Hollywood news website had reported in July 2015 that Lionsgate had closed the rights to adapt the manga into a live-action film, and was in talks with Gracey to direct. Gracey has previously worked in visual effects and animation.

 

The Tracking Board also reported last year that Avi Arad (Hollywood's Ghost in the Shell, Gamba: Gamba to Nakama-tachi) and his son Ari Arad are producing the film at Arad Productions, and Erik Feig, Geoff Shaveitz and Kelly O'Malley are overseeing the film.

Kishimoto launched ninja manga in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1999, and ended the series in November 2014. The manga has spawned the Naruto and Naruto Shippūden television anime series, OVAs, several anime films, spinoff manga, the Boruto sequel manga series, a series of novels, and video games.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-12-17/masashi-kishimoto-is-involved-in-production-on-lionsgate-michael-gracey-naruto-hollywood-film/.110034

 

[Tornado3000]

The fact that Masashi Kishimoto is involved might mean it'll be halfway decent.  In my experience, live action adaptions of anime usually mean disaster.

[haremking]

I hope they don't butcher it. Kishimoto will hopefully keep it in the right direction.

[Predaking-117]

We're never going to learn, are we? Live-action adaptations of a lot of things, be it anime, cartoons, and especially video games, are hit and miss. For live-action versions of anime, the majority of the time, they're a miss. Hollywood never learned from Dragonball Evolution. They didn't learn from The Last Airbender (I know the show isn't an anime, but a lot of people still say that regardless). I know the upcoming live-action Bleach movie will be bad. Same with Ghost in the Shell. Y'know what, screw it. I want this naruto project to crash and burn spectacularly. 

Edited December 20, 2016 by Predaking-117

[Koby]

3 hours ago, Predaking-117 said:

We're never going to learn, are we? Live-action adaptations of a lot of things, be it anime, cartoons, and especially video games, are hit and miss. For live-action versions of anime, the majority of the time, they're a miss. Hollywood never learned from Dragonball Evolution. They didn't learn from The Last Airbender (I know the show isn't an anime, but a lot of people still say that regardless). I know the upcoming live-action Bleach movie will be bad. Same with Ghost in the Shell. Y'know what, screw it. I want this naruto project to crash and burn spectacularly. 

In my opinion anime to live-action adaptations can work depending on the type of anime it is, the problem is the people who adapt them don't bother to check into the source material from the start. Something like Dragon Ball Z is never going to come out good in live-action, but something like Psycho-Pass or Ghost in the Shell "could" if given a chance. Shows that are more grounded or realistic with it's settings and character styles for example. Sci-Fi anime has a lot better chance of coming out good in the conversion than a shounen does. The problem though is the source material needs to either be treated faithfully or you need to do an original story that can still fit as a faithful side-story. This part they never seem to get right.

 

Dragon Ball Evolution for example opted to completely re-write characters and their backstories. Oozaru instead of being a transformation that Saiyans do under the moonlight, was instead a slave to the Namekian control? Namekians had never even heard of Saiyans iirc until Vegeta and the gang went to Namek during the Namekian saga. Namekians were a peaceful group outside of the original King Piccolo and they certainly wouldn't have ruled over the Saiyan race, lol... This was so terrible it actually made you laugh because the writers clearly never watched/read the source at all and decided to just make a show about a highschool kid with the name Goku who fought an anime who could control him in his monkey form. It had no basis on the original story at all, and this is one of the many reasons it was terrible.