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Like it or not, a live-action Naruto movie seems to be coming from Hollywood after spending many years in development hell. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton is currently attached to the project, and while he might have the directing sauce needed to pull off a flashy manga/anime adaptation, we’re understandably worried about such a tricky transition regardless. Now, the movie’s original writer is trying to calm fans down.
Entertainment Weekly recently talked to scribe Tasha Huo, the showrunner for Netflix’s upcoming Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft animated series, and of course, tried to extract new information regarding Naruto. To their surprise (and everyone else’s), she actually spoke at length about the process of putting that movie together so far.
While Cretton is now part of Hollywood’s ‘big leagues’ thanks to Shang-Chi’s reasonable success in 2021 – just as we were starting to exit the worst of the Covid pandemic – his background doing original work is extensive, and he’s also found time to continue to produce shorts and TV series after his Marvel movie found an audience. Huo praised that aspect of his career, saying “his own writing and storytelling” is “very personal and relatable” to viewers before teasing the main idea behind the Naruto movie is to focus on the characters and what they go through: “This is definitely a movie that comes at it from a love of who Naruto is and that character and his relationships.”
Amidst all the flashy action sequences and mythology-building, most Marvel Cinematic Universe fans admit that a big part of Shang-Chi’s appeal was the relationship between the protagonist and Xu Wenwu aka The (real) Mandarin at the center of it all; really solid family drama gluing everything together, something that Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame’s creatives really understood and that several other Marvel flicks failed to capture.
“After enjoying his other films and understanding that his forte is in creating solid dramas about people, I became convinced that there is no other director for [Naruto]. In actually meeting Destin, I also found him to be an open-minded director who was willing to embrace my input, and felt strongly that we would be able to cooperate together in the production process,” Huo added. While Cretton is now also attached to Naruto as writer, likely reworking the script into something he’s fully comfortable with before moving into active pre-production, the fact he’s fully embraced the previous writer’s input is encouraging news and something that doesn’t always happen with this sort of complex production.
Still, there are many things that could go wrong with a big-budget anime adaptation set up at Lionsgate. Netflix’s One Piece series was encouraging, but theatrical movies are very different beasts, so we’re hoping that Cretton manages to navigate those waters with less trouble than when he was attached to the now-cancelled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty (not his fault).