Tim Burton has made a career out of making weirdos look cool. Beetlejuice is a walking bad decision. Edward Scissorhands has blenders for hands. Sweeney Todd’s demon barber speaks for itself. Burton understood the appeal of outsiders long before Hollywood started turning every comic-book character into a billion-dollar franchise. The director eventually developed an interest in a Japanese sci-fi story about a teenage girl with psychic powers. It’s a fairly common concept in the world of manga and anime, and it is plenty ripe for a Tim Burton twist.
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The really crazy part? A new wave band was already trying to turn the same story into a musical. Yes, a manga musical. Because apparently Hollywood hadn’t made things complicated enough. The project had a studio, a director, and some genuinely unusual creative minds behind it. It also arrived at a time when American audiences were only beginning to discover Japanese comics. Had the movie happened, it might have introduced a whole lot of people to manga years before anime became a regular part of pop culture. Instead, one of the strangest potential blockbusters of the ’90s disappeared into Hollywood’s enormous filing cabinet of what-ifs.
Tim Burton Almost MadeMai, the Psychic GirlInto a Movie
The manga was Mai, the Psychic Girl. It was written by Kazuya Kudo and drawn by Ryoichi Ikegami. Mai Kuju is a teenage girl with psychic powers, and a secret organization wants to control her abilities. It sounds a lot like one of my favorite Japanese stories of all time: Akira. The obvious difference is that Mai is a girl, while Tetsuo and Kaneda are male. This could have been Burton’s first female protagonist. It wasn’t until later that he made Corpse Bride, Alice in Wonderland, Big Eyes, and others.
Think about the director’s work around this period. Edward Scissorhands was about a misunderstood outsider who couldn’t quite fit into suburbia. Batman Returns gave us a lonely billionaire, a bitter woman turned into Catwoman, and a villain who looked like he’d been assembled in a very unhappy basement. Burton liked strange characters with real pain underneath all the gothic window dressing. Mai would have fit right in.
And the timing was interesting, too. Carolco Pictures acquired the film rights in August 1991, with Burton attached to direct. The studio hoped to get production moving in 1992. Then Burton chose to work on The Nightmare Before Christmas and Ed Wood. The option expired, and the movie went nowhere. That’s a pretty spectacular near-miss. Burton made a stop-motion Halloween classic instead, so it’s hard to complain too much.
How a Lost Tim Burton Movie Could Have Changed Manga in America
Here’s where things get interesting. Mai, the Psychic Girl wasn’t some obscure Japanese comic that nobody outside Japan had heard of. It was among the early manga series published in English, with Viz and Eclipse Comics bringing it to American readers in 1987. Manga was still a niche interest in the United States. You couldn’t walk into a bookstore and find entire walls devoted to it. For many readers, discovering a Japanese comic was a bit like finding a secret door in a familiar room. There was a whole world on the other side, and most people hadn’t even noticed the handle.
Now imagine a Tim Burton movie introducing that world to a much larger audience. Burton was a major name after Batman and Edward Scissorhands. A film based on Mai could have sent curious viewers looking for the original manga. It might have encouraged publishers to take more chances on Japanese comics, too. Hollywood has a long history of turning promising ideas into expensive curiosities. But the opportunity was there, and the project had another wonderfully odd twist.
Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks had spent years trying to turn Mai into a musical. Their experience eventually helped inspire The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, a radio musical about the frustrations of getting a project made. So even the failure became material for something else. Manga would eventually find a huge American audience without Burton’s help. But imagine if he’d been one of the people who opened that door. But there is one caveat. The only issue the movie would have faced would’ve most likely been the miscasting of Mai from Japanese to Caucasian.
Rumor had it that Burton was planning on casting Winona Ryder at the time. Still, this will always be a monumental what-if in Hollywood history and for both American and Japanese culture at large. Would you have wanted to see Tim Burton taking on this manga classic? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
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