Movie Make-out

Continuing its dominance over the “geek movie watching” audience, Variety reported that Warner Bros. acquired the rights to develop Ninja Scroll into a live-action feature. Alex Tse (Watchmen) will be the screenwriter, but there are no details as to whether or not they’ll be adapting the original OVA or the TV series that followed. The lucky production studio in charge is Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way (11th Hour) who will be co-producing with original anime studio Madhouse (thank God).

For those of you who aren’t the anime brand of geek, Scroll is the story of a wandering ninja (who actually carries a katana, not a ninjato) who has to stop an old enemy from his past from overthrowing a feudal Japanese government. Along the way, he battles some really freaky characters (such as a humongous man whose skin is like stone from the OVA).

AICN speculates that this news will put an end to those idiotic rumors that James McTeigue’s upcoming Ninja Assassin was secretly a Ninja Scroll flick, but I think they are overly optimistic.

You’ll remember from an earlier report that the WB also (re-)acquired the rights to Akira and are making that into a two-parter. If both part one of Akira and the entire Ninja Scroll movie happen to make it into theaters in the same summer, I think the collective geekgasm would render all computers inoperable for a solid month.

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