If you've been eagerly awaiting the live-action adaptation of the always popular anime Cowboy Bebop, you're going to have to wait just a little bit longer. Keanu Reeves, the film's main acting anchor, recently told MTV that the adaptation does have a finished script, it just so happens to be one that would require a Scrooge McDuck-esque silo full of gold coins to actually bring it to life. In Reeves' own words, "There's a draft of the script, but the writer did such a great job [that] in order to make the movie, you would need half a billion dollars."Now one may wonder whether or not a writer has indeed done a good job if his script is so extremely cost-prohibitive that it cannot feasibly get made, but it seems the problem lays in just how meticulous writer Peter Craig has been in bringing the story of intergalactic bounty hunters to the big screen. According to a second MTV report, Craig described his script as "extremely true to the show", a statement that was made before Fox had actually read his adaptation.
Now this isn't to say that Cowboy Bebop is dead-in-the-water, it's just a pre-production roadblock. It'll now be up to Craig, and whoever else Fox decides to bring in (and they will almost certainly be bringing in more writers to trim the fat), to scale things down to a reasonable level. To their credit, it seems that Fox understands a film involving spaceships, bounty hunters, mutants, and all manner of star-bound gangsters and creatures all under the umbrella of a very noir visual umbrellas is not going to be done on a tiny budget, but $500,000,000 is not something that gets handed out to, well, anyone but James Cameron.
