Another famous Japanese anime is getting the live-action treatment.
Reki Kawahara’s famous novel “Sword Art Online” will soon be adapted into a Hollywood live-action television series.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, America’s Skydance Television has recently acquired the global live-action rights to the anime and is currently in the process of developing the television series.
“Sword Art Online” first became famous in Japan as a series of light novels in 2009, and then as an anime series in 2012.
Though the anime did not achieve quite the same breakout success among western audiences as animes like “Dragon Ball” or “Ghost in the Shell”, “Sword Art Online” still proved to be a massive hit for fans of video games and animation.
The series is famous enough to spawn multiple anime seasons, manga retellings, and five video game adaptations.
The pilot episode of the live-action adaptation will be written by American screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis who has worked on renowned films like “Shutter Island” and “Terminator Genisys”.
“SAO is a massive pop-culture phenomenon from which we plan to launch a full-scale and wide-ranging set of live-action franchise extensions across our business verticals, beginning with television,” Skydance Media CEO Ellison said.
“We look forward to working alongside Laeta, Reki Kawahara and the teams at Kadokawa and Aniplex to build out a deeply immersive new universe of SAO in an authentic way that honors its well-established fan base around the globe.”
“Sword Art Online” follows a brilliant young beta tester Kirito and his group of friends alongside 10,000 other people, who are all trapped in a next-generation virtual reality online role-playing game. The game is a world unto itself: filled with sword fighting, monsters, magic and mystery, where the stakes are life and death. Kirito and an ensemble of diverse characters must fight their way through this hostile environment while making lives for themselves in this fantastical world.