I can’t even joke about Guillermo del Toro picking up tons of projects anymore. It’s too easy. The new addition to his slate is the manga Monster, which del Toro is TV show-ifying for HBO.
(Game of Thrones. A Guillermo del Toro-helmed manga adaptation. Dang, HBO. So geeky. Keep it up.)
Monster concerns a young neurosurgeon named Kenzō whose past comes back to haunt him in the form of the eponymous “Monster,” named Johan, whose life Kenzō saved when Johan was just a boy. Written and illustrated by Naoki Urasawa, it was made into an anime series a few years back.
del Toro’s original idea was to adapt Monster into a movie for New Line, but given its 18 volumes would’ve been kind of hard to trim down to a two-hour running time, that plan never materialized. But now HBO has commissioned a pilot, which del Toro will direct and Sherlock/Doctor Who writer Steve Thompson (he wrote “The Curse of the Black Spot” and this week’s “The Journey to the Center of the TARDIS” for Doctor Who and “The Sign of Three,” “The Reichenbach Fall” and “The Blind Banker” for Sherlock) will pen.
Empire notes that, if the pilot is successful, Thompson will run the series, with del Toro staying on as a co-executive producer. The pair of them will work together to write the overall story. So it sounds like del Toro’s pulling a J.J. Abrams, basically: Developing and planning the show, getting it going, and stepping aside to work on his own (many) film projects.
I’m not particularly into anime or manga myself, but the plot sounds interesting, and del Toro’s involvement definitely piques my interest. HBO getting into the manga game is intriguing, regardless. Who’s doing a happy dance right now? Step forward.
(via: Empire)
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