Netflix got the ball rolling on a live-action adaptation of iconic anime series Cowboy Bebop several years ago which will star John Cho as bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, Alex Hassell as Vicious, and Elena Satine as Julia. Production got underway last year, but was shut down when Cho suffered a serious knee injury, and with COVID-19 keeping most projects on the shelf, it's hard to say when production will resume.
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who serves as a writer on Cowboy Bebop, spoke with io9 and dropped a few details about the upcoming live-action series. There's been a history of Hollywood dropping the ball when it comes to anime adaptations, but Grillo-Marxuach insists that the spirit of the original won't be lost in translation.
You can’t look at Cowboy Bebop and say, ‘Well, it’s just a take-off point. We’re going to give them different hair and different clothing, and we’re gonna call it something different. And it’s just sort of gonna be a loose thing.' If you’re doing Cowboy Bebop, you’re doing Cowboy Bebop. You know? It’s kind of like doing Star Wars.
That's not to say that Netflix's Cowboy Bebop won't bring its own style to the table; where the anime series was told in 22-minute installments, the live-action series will consist of hour-long episodes, meaning that there's room to expand the world and characters. "We don’t want the fans of the show to look at it and say that we failed them or we failed the original," said Grillo-Marxuach. "You’ve got a show where you have 26 episodes that are full of very colorful villains, very colorful stories, very colorful adversaries, bounties, and all of that," Grillo-Marxuach continued. "We’re not going to go one-to-one on all of those stories because we’re also trying to tell the broader story of Spike Spiegel and the Syndicate, Spike Spiegel and Julia, Spike Spiegel and Vicious, and all that. But we are looking at the show and saying, ‘Who are some of the great villains in this show, and how can we put them into this into this broader narrative?’ So that we are telling both of the big stories that Cowboy Bebop tells."
A second season of Cowboy Bebop is already underway, and while the first season of the series isn't expected to drop until at least 2021, Javier Grillo-Marxuach hopes that it will be worth the wait. "Everybody has a different idea of what the best version of a show is, and a lot of Cowboy Bebop fans believe that the anime is the best version of that show," Grillo-Marxuach said. "We hope that we can convert them to look at our version of it, and think that it’s a wonderful translation, a wonderful addition to the original canon. We’re deep enough in a world that where fandom is important to the existence of shows, that people like me don’t ever really lose sight of that. I think that there are always going to be tone-deaf reboots of things and all of that, but we’re fans. You know, we come at this as fans. We love genre, we love science fiction, and we love Cowboy Bebop."