Remember That Time Keanu Reeves Was Set To Star in a COWBOY BEBOP Movie?!
Back in 2008, it was announced that a live-action Cowboy Bebop film was being developed for 20th Century Fox by producer Erwin Stoff, and not long after that it was announced that Keanu Reeves would be playing Spike Spiegel in the film and I have no doubt he would’ve been awesome in the role.
This is one of those films that I would’ve loved to see get made. It’s own of these interesting “what if” scenarios, kind of like Nicolas Cage playing Superman in Tim Burton’s Superman Lives. This is one of those roles that I think would’ve fit Reeves perfectly and it’s kind of a shame that it never happened.
The film was being developed by Stoff, original anime director Shinichirō Watanabe, original script supervisor Keiko Nobumoto, and Sunrise Studios president Kenji Uchida. They were all producers on the movie and when talking about it in an interview with iF Magazine, Stoff said: "I have such an enormous admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern is going to be a real degree of faithfulness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of genres, and so on and so forth.”
It makes sense that Stoff wanted to bring Reeves on board as he had previously worked with him on A Scanner Darkly. Unfortunately, the project never gained momentum and it ended up being scrapped. The script for the film was written by Peter Craig (The Town, The Batman, Top Gun: Maverick) and it was loosely based on the first episode of the anime "Asteroid Blues," and the last episode "The Real Folk Blues."
When talking about the project and the script, Reeves said during a 2013 Reddit AMA: "Cowboy Bebop does not look like it is going to happen with me in it. The script that was written was great and amazing, but it would cost like half a billion dollars to make it, and while I wished and hoped I would have done that project, we are working on trying to get Bill & Ted 3. There's a script and we are trying to put it together."
Half a billion!? Yeah, they wouldn’t have needed that kind of budget to make the movie. It’s pretty wild that they were looking at such a massive budget, though!
The story was set in the far-off future, “inter-planetary bounty hunting becomes a hot profession. But when a mysterious bounty is put on one bounty hunter’s head, he must find out who did it, and kill them before he becomes a victim of his own profession.” You can read more details on the script from Script Shadow, and would’ve been wild to see it get made.
Instead, we got that disappointing live-action series adaptation from Netflix, which got canceled after one season.
It’s too late now unless they make an Old Man Spike movie, but would you have liked to see Reeves get to star in a Cowboy Bobop movie? I included a deepfake video!
Thanks to /Film for the reminder!