A movie adaptation of the popular manga Lone Wolf and Cub is still in the works, and the project is taking key steps forward. Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker has signed on to pen the script, THR reports.
Walker will be tasked with telling a story that has been read around the world. Created by writer Kazou Koike and artist Goseki Kojima, the manga debuted in 1970 in Japan. The story continued to be published in 300-plus-page volumes for the next several years, ultimately totaling more than 8,700 pages. Its popularity led to an English translation, and the manga made its way stateside for the first time in 1987.
A revenge story, Lone Wolf and Cub is known for being brutal yet historically accurate. It centers on Ogami Itto, a warrior and master swordsman who seeks vengeance after his family — save for his young son — is murdered by another clan. The boy, Daigoro, learns from his father, and the two work as assassins as they continue pursuing their brand of justice.
Walker will not be the first to adapt Lone Wolf and Cub. The manga has inspired at least eight movies so far, including a six-film series that released in Japan in the ’70s. From those films came 1980’s Shogun Assassin and its sequel, which were released for English-speaking audiences.
The new project is being produced by Justin Lin, who has directed multiple Fast and Furious films. He is expected to helm the manga-based film. His banner, Perfect Storm, is also producing, as well as Marissa McMahon and Kamala Films.
Walker comes to the adaptation with interesting — and yes, violent — credits to his name. He wrote the acclaimed, gritty 1995 neo-noir crime thriller film Seven (stylized as SE7EN), starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey. He has also worked on the upcoming English version of The Girl Who Played With Fire, an early draft of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and 2010’s The Wolfman, among others. Walker’s track record shows he should be ready to do Lone Wolf and Cub justice.
No timeline for the film’s release has been announced, but hopefully the addition of Walker will get the project rolling.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?