The long-stagnated development of manga/anime property Tiger & Bunny is breathing new life coming into the weekend.
According to the trades, SK Global is partnering with Bandai Namco Pictures to produce a live-action series. Raven Metzner (Fox series “Sleepy Hollow”, Marvel’s “Iron Fist”) set to adapt and serve as showrunner, and will executive produce alongside Bandai Namco’s Ozaki Masayuki (Sunrise’s “Tiger & Bunny”), and Filosophia CEO Fujimura Tetsu (“Cowboy Bebop,” “Ghost in the Shell”).
The story is set in Manhattan-inspired Stern Bild City, where super-powered beings dubbed NEXT (Noted Entities with eXtraordinary Talents) are not only heralded, but sponsored and commercialized on television. At the center of our story: two titular heroes with distinctively different ideologies on what it means to be a superhero.
Tiger & Bunny ran as a manga with publications out of Kadokawa Shoten and Shueisha, as well as a televised anime in 2011 followed by a seuqel season that launched in April, and an anime film in 2012.
The property was announced for a live-action development as a movie twice back in 2015 and 2018 with both efforts floundering over time. Variety notes in its latest report the acknowlegment of the show’s popularity overseas according to Fujimura, as well as the appeal to streaming which factored into switching gears to a live-action series, instead of a feature.
“We see this as a strong property for English-language adaptation, in part because of the popularity and awareness that the show already enjoys outside Japan, and partly because of its unique concept,” Fujimura told Variety.
He goes on:
“Both Imagine and Global Road planned to make feature film adaptations. But that was before streaming became so mainstream. Now, SK Global conceives it as a series. Development is under way and it will be pitched to broadcasters and streamers. Netflix could be a candidate, of course, but at the moment nobody knows,” said Fujimura.
Metzner’s credits partly include shows like Falling Skies, Heroes Reborn and Sleepy Hollow. In 2017, he replaced Scott Buck as showrunner for the second season of Marvel’s Iron Fist during its run on Netflix.
Speaking freely here, it didn’t help that season one of Iron Fist didn’t perform as well as it should have, which resulted in a lot of stigma from fans about the second season, and a few folks I’ve observed in the chatter about the show that year already had their minds made up, which is a shame because I thought it was a huge improvement. In my view, Metzner’s a more than wise choice here, so on a live-action Tiger & Bunny series, I’m looking forward to this.
Read more at Variety.