Like it or not, a live-action Naruto movie appears to be emerging from Hollywood after years of development hell. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton is currently attached to the project, and while he may have the directorial chops needed to pull off a gorgeous comic/animation adaptation, it’s okay to be worried about such a tricky transition Don’t care if you understand. Now, the film’s original screenwriter is trying to calm fans down.
Entertainment Weekly recently spoke with Tasha Huo, a writer on Netflix’s upcoming Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft animated series, and of course, to get new information about Naruto. To their (and others’) surprise, she actually went into great detail about the process of making the film so far.
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While Shang-Chi has enjoyed considerable success in 2021, Cretton is now part of Hollywood’s “big leagues” — just as we’re starting to emerge from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic — working on original work With an extensive background, he’s also found time to continue creating short films and TV series after his Marvel movies captivated audiences. Ho praised this aspect of his career, saying “his own writing and storytelling” are “very personal and relatable” to audiences, before teasing that the main idea behind the Naruto movies was to focus on the characters and their What happened: “It was definitely a movie born out of a love of who Naruto is, that character, and his relationships.”
Amid all the flashy action scenes and myth-building, most Marvel Cinematic Universe fans will admit that a large part of Shang-Chi’s appeal lies in the relationship between the protagonist and Xu Wenwu, the (real) man at the center of it all The Mandarin; a truly grounded family drama that glues everything together, something that the creatives behind Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame truly understood in a way that several other Marvel movies have failed to capture at this point.
“After seeing his other films and understanding that his strength was in creating solid dramas about characters, I became convinced that no other director could [Naruto]. When I actually met with Destin, I also found him to be an open-minded director who was receptive to my input and felt strongly that we could work together on the production process. It was also added that for Naruto as a writer, he would probably rework the script into something he was completely familiar with before going into active pre-production, and the fact that he fully accepted the previous writer’s input is encouraging message, which doesn’t always happen with a production this complex.
Still, there are a lot of things that could go wrong with a big-budget animated adaptation from Lionsgate. Netflix’s One Piece series is encouraging, but theatrical movies are a very different beast, so here’s hoping Cretton has less trouble than he had in the now-cancelled Avengers: Reign of Kang Something (it’s not his fault).