YOUR NAME Remake Coming From Director Of Two Worst SPIDER-MAN Movies
Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) has boarded Toho and Bad Robot's remake of Japanese animation phenomenon Your Name., which depending on your view of Webb's non-spider output could be a good thing or a bad thing. (His spider-related output is terrible, and there's no room for debate on this, I'm afraid.)
The original Japanese animated film did remarkably well at both the box office (grossing over $350 million worldwide) and with awards bodies (scoring nominations and wins from around the world). It tells the story of a pair of young people, from the city and the country, respectively, who find their consciousnesses switching bodies, and form an intimate relationship through that unusual means. There's also a comet disaster and time travel involved. It's rather beloved by its fan base.
Webb's version of the story transplants the story to America, and the Japanese mystical elements to Native American culture, which could either be really smart or a colossal misstep, depending on how it's handled - there's not really much middle ground on that. Cold Pursuit did that, too, making it one of the cleverer American remakes of foreign films in the process, but I still have to give Webb some side-eye. Despite the story absolutely fitting into Webb's high-concept romance wheelhouse, he's not even reliable operating inside that wheelhouse, so we'll see.
The remake is being produced by J.J. Abrams and Lindsey Weber from Bad Robot, and the original film's producer Genki Kawamura, while the script is written by Eric Heisserer, who recently followed up his script for Arrival with the script for Bird Box. Says Kawamura:
“Marc was our first choice to direct this refashioned interpretation of the film from the moment we explored creating an American version. As we saw in (500) Days Of Summer, Marc has a tremendous talent for telling great love stories and in the same way moviegoers were captivated by the original film, we are certain Marc will engage fans of the original and an entirely new audience for these characters’ beautiful journey. With J.J. Abrams producing, Eric Heisserer writing and Marc directing, this project officially has the team we dreamed about.”
How do you feel about this, Your Name fans? Excited? Appalled? Nonplussed? Do Amazing Spider-Man 2 fans exist?
