With a trailer expected to arrive this weekend, Netflix has shared the first poster for its live-action adaptation of the classic anime Cowboy Bebop featuring John Cho’s Spike Spiegel alongside Daniella Pineda’s Fate Valentine and Mustafa Shakir’s Jet Black.
Meanwhile, speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Andre Nemec has been speaking about adapting the source material, reassuring fans that the live-action version won’t violate the established canon, but instead aims to expand on the anime and its characters.
“I promise we will never take the original anime away from the purists. It will always exist out there, but I’m very excited about the stories that we’re telling,” states Nemec. “I believe we’ve done a really nice job of not violating the canon in any direction but merely offering some extra glimpses into the world that was already created. We got under the skin of who the live-action characters were going to be.”
“I think that the poetic nature of the anime absolutely allowed for us to mine the archetypal nature of the characters and dig out deeper histories that we wanted to explore – and answer some of the questions that the anime leaves you with,” he continued. “I think to just redo the anime will leave an audience hungry for something that they already saw. The anime did an amazing job. We don’t need to serve the exact same meal. I think it would have been disappointing if we did.”
COWBOY BEBOP is an action-packed space Western about three bounty hunters, aka “cowboys,” all trying to outrun the past. As different as they are deadly, Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) form a scrappy, snarky crew ready to hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals — for the right price. But they can only kick and quip their way out of so many scuffles before their pasts finally catch up with them.
Cowboy Bebop arrives on Netflix on November 19th and features a cast that includes John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, Alex Hassell, Elena Satine, Geoff Stults, Tamara Tunie, Mason Alexander Park, Rachel House and Ann Truong.