At a panel at the Tokyo International Anime Fair, Sunrise addressed the issue of the Cowboy Bebop movie we love talking about. The word is that because of Keanu Reeves' extreme interest in the project, visiting Japan twice to meet with Sunrise staff to try and convince them into doing the film, the project was agreed upon. Otherwise, they would have just said no to the whole thing.

Part of why it's taken so long for this project to get off the ground is because of contract negotiations between Sunrise and 20th Century Fox, where Sunrise can assert a high level of quality control. At the panel they said, "If the script is terrible, the live-action film adaptation will not be approved."

So they won't have complete control over the film, but hopefully this way a lot of the kinks can be worked out, and avoid turning this into something on the level of Dragon Ball Evolution or Johnny Mnemonic. I expect it'll be a long time before this film actually gets into the shooting phase, because whenever there's a point of contention in the script, things will need to be translated back and forth between English and Japanese, slowing things down significantly.

Nonetheless, I'll remain hopeful about this. I believe in the magic of Hollywood.