News

Live-Action Cobra Planned at US$100 Million+ for 2013

The entertainment industry news magazine Variety reports that pre-production on Piranha 3D director Alexandre Aja's planned live-action adaptation of Buichi Terasawa's manga series Cobra will begin this fall, with a tentative summer 2013 release for the final cut. The Paris-based film production and distribution firms Onyx Films and Studio 37 are now attached.

According to the report, Onyx and Studio 37 plan to produce the film with a budget of over US$100 million and several of their own employees, including producers Aton Soumache and Dimitri Rassom, co-producers Alexandra Milchan and Gregory Levasseur, and executive producers Marc Sessego and Andree Cornier. Aja is still attached to direct and produce, and the film will be based on his own script, co-written with Levasseur.

Cobra began in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1978 and was already adapted into an animated television series and film in 1982. NTT Solmare put the manga on Apple's iTunes App Store in English last September.

A video anime project, Cobra The Animation: The Psychogun, launched in Japan in 2008. A second two-volume project, Cobra The Animation: Time Drive, followed in 2009, and a new Cobra The Animation television series aired last year. The media-distribution website Crunchyroll began streaming these newer anime projects in 2009.

Besides Cobra, Terasawa also created the Goku - Midnight Eye and Kabuto manga, along with their respective anime adaptations.