Remember that time Keanu Reeves was supposed to star in a COWBOY BEBOP movie?!

In 2008, it was announced that a live-action Cowboy bebop the film had been developed for 20th Century Fox by the producer Erwin Stoffand not long after he announced it Keanu Reeves he would have played Spike Spiegel in the film and I have no doubt that he would have been fantastic in the role.

This is one of those films that I would have loved to see made. It’s just one of these interesting “what if” scenarios, a bit like NIcolas Cage playing Superman Tim Burton’S Superman lives. This is one of those roles that I think would suit Reeves perfectly and it’s a shame it never happened.

The film was developed by Stoff, the anime’s original director Shinichiro Watanabeoriginal script supervisor Keiko Nobumotoand president of Sunrise Studios Kenji Uchida. They were all producers on the film and speaking about it in an interview with iF Magazine, Stoff said: “I have such great admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern will be a real degree of fidelity to the film.” tone of the film, the mix of genres and so on”.

It makes sense that Stoff wanted to bring Reeves on board since he had worked with him before A Scanner darkly. Unfortunately, the project never gained momentum and was shelved. The film’s screenplay was written by Peter Craig (The City, Batman, Top Gun: Maverick) and was loosely based on the first anime episode “Asteroid Blues” and the last episode “The Real Folk Blues”.

Speaking about the project and the script, Reeves said during a 2013 Reddit AMA: “Cowboy Bebop doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen with me. The script that was written was great and amazing, but it would cost about half as much.” a billion dollars to make it, and as much as I wanted and hoped to make that project, we’re working on trying to get Bill & Ted 3. There’s a script and we’re trying to put it together.

Half a billion!? Yes, they wouldn’t have needed that kind of budget to make the film. It’s pretty crazy that they were looking at such a massive budget, though!

The story was set in the distant future, “interplanetary bounty hunting becomes a hot profession. But when a mysterious bounty is placed on a bounty hunter’s head, he must find out who did it and kill him before he becomes a victim of his own profession. You can read more details about the script from Script Shadow and it would have been great to see it made.

Instead, we got that disappointing live-action series adaptation from Netflix, which was canceled after one season.

It’s too late now unless they make a movie about Old Man Spike, but would you have liked to see Reeves star in a movie? Cowboy Bobop movie? I’ve included a deepfake video!

Thanks to /Film for the reminder!