Tokyopop moving ahead with Lament of the Lamb live action

[Paul]

Tokyopop founder Stuart "DJ Milky" Levy is <a href="http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2008-03-19/tokyopop-levy-plans-3d-lament-of-the-lamb-film">pushing ahead</a> with his plans to produce live action, English language movies based on a number of his company's most popular manga series.

First in line seems to be 'Love Like Blood', which is said to be based on the incestuous vampire manga '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_of_the_Lamb">Lament of the Lamb</a>', but if that is the case, Tokyopop have taken predictable liberties with the source material; essentially, the two main characters are no longer siblings. The movie, which should be around 120-minutes in length and financed with a budget of little more than $6 million, is also intended to be presented in theaters as 3-D, while the director will be <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1047683/">Takahiko Akiyama</a>, whose main claim to fame appears to be that he worked on the visual effects for 2001's Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. No release date has been set, but you can read more about the movie <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/international/news/e3if4e91f7b1cbab8c2c29d3aeecd6e3b41">at The Hollywood Reporter</a>.

 

[melonpan]

Shame Tokyopop's other adventure into novels has somewhat failed.

Maybe this adventure into movies will be different.. *remembers ADV's NGE plans*

EDIT: It seem Tokyopop are just keeping their larger novel licenses, i.e Twelve Kingdoms volume 2 has just been posted!

 

[CitizenGeek]

Hmm, a tiny budget, a director from one of cinema's largest flops and the altering of one of the most important aspects of the story ... how could it possibly fail? :s

 

[melonpan]

Hmm, a tiny budget, a director from one of cinema's largest flops and the altering of one of the most important aspects of the story ... how could possibly fail? :s

I didn't know it was that much of a flop.

I absolutely loved the film, it's just people weren't open minded enough to go down the CGI movie route all those years ago. Advent Children has done a hell of a lot better, which just goes to show how peoples attitudes have changed.

I think FF:TSW is becoming less of a flop and must have made back quite a bit of that apparent $120m loss, due to it being on the TV more or less every year... And I'm sure more and more people are buying it and/or finding out about it now. Meh. Gotta start somewhere.

Anyhow, I think this film will be sufficiently awesome, seeing as I loved FF:TSW.

 

[Martin]

The fact that the two characters are siblings is one of the central themes of the story! :shock: A more commonsense approach would be to reduce the incestuous overtones before changing anything else.

The original manga is really quite good actually, but the animated OAV was a bit 'meh' - LotL just isn't the sort of story that lends itself well to the paper-to-screen transition. A two hour film might be long enough to do a seven volume manga justice without leaving too many plot points out, but otherwise I'm not too hopeful for this one.

 

[CitizenGeek]

I didn't know it was that much of a flop.

Well, that Wikipedia article states that it was the biggest flop ever for a while :/

I absolutely loved the film, it's just people weren't open minded enough to go down the CGI movie route all those years ago. Advent Children has done a hell of a lot better, which just goes to show how peoples attitudes have changed.

Yeah, I liked it too. I bought it on DVD the day after watching it on TV. It's a very enjoyable film, and it looks stunning. Not perfect, sure, but I liked it all the same. However, I don't think Advent Children was such a big success because the public is more open to CGI now, I think it was a big success because it managed to properly 'use' the FFVII fanbase. Square Enix done a very effective job of marketing it, too.

I think FF:TSW is becoming less of a flop and must have made back quite a bit of that apparent $120m loss, due to it being on the TV more or less every year... And I'm sure more and more people are buying it and/or finding out about it now. Meh. Gotta start somewhere.

I'm all the TV airings and the various DVD sets, the UMD release and upcoming Blu-Ray release are chipping away at that huge loss, but I doubt they'll ever clear that crippling deficit.