The Cowboy Bebop Netflix Adaptation was put on hiatus after star John Cho suffered a knee injury during filming last year.
Production was therefore expected to stall for six or seven months, while Cho recovered from his injury. Reports suggested that only a week of production had gone by before the setback. However, a recent interview with Snowpiercer producer Marty Adelstein has revealed that far more progress has been made on the anime-based series than initially thought.
“So, we have finished three episodes. I think we’re into [shooting] six; then John Cho tore his ACL, unfortunately. But I have to tell you I really like the show. It’s really fun,” he said to SyfyWire. “And we have gone out of our way, because of all these anime movies that have come out and been accused of being whitewashed, we have really gone out of our way. The characters are all sort of multiethnic, and it’s a great cast. And the two episodes I have seen are so much fun. It’s really fun.”
Adelstein is referring to such films as 2017’s Ghost in the Shell live-action adaptation, where critics criticised the casting of Scarlett Johansson in an intrinsically Japanese story. The casting of multiethnic actors therefore would help the Cowboy Bebop series avoid this kind of accusation. Regardless, it will please fans that the series is further along than initially thought.
There’s still no word on when we will see Spike Spiegel and co. on our living room screens but we will be sure to keep you posted once news breaks out.
For One Piece fans, however, the news is less positive, due to the nightmare that is COVID-19:
We were supposed to start filming in August in Cape Town, South Africa. We anticipate the date being able to film [now is] September, at the latest,” Adelstein said. “We have basically all 10 scripts written. We will start casting when we go back. My suspicion is June 1, but we will start doing our casting. We have a lot of names that we’re talking about, and we should be in production in September. We have been working very closely with Sensei Oda. So, we’re going to get started, and this one is very big. I mean, Snowpiercer was a big production; this is even bigger.”
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