Cary Fuku­na­ga will go cyber­punk with a ​‘Tokyo Ghost’ adaptation

Cary Fuku­na­ga is one of the direc­tors cur­rent­ly trapped in a hold­ing pat­tern while he awaits the release of his dust-gath­er­ing block­buster, sit­ting on the upcom­ing 007 pic­ture No Time to Die while his career’s next big phase is put on pause. But that doesn’t mean he can’t con­tin­ue plan­ning for the future.

The Hol­ly­wood Reporter reports that Fuku­na­ga has set up his next film with Leg­endary, recent­ly respon­si­ble for Detec­tive Pikachu and the neo-Godzil­la pic­tures. He’ll con­tin­ue in the effects-dri­ven tent­pole mode, as he sets plans to adapt the cult com­ic series ​‘Tokyo Ghost’ for his fol­low-up to the pend­ing out­ing with James Bond.

The series began its print run in 2015, suck­ing read­ers into a tech­no-dystopia where human­i­ty has been benumbed by its addic­tion to screens. The lat­est assign­ment tak­en on by hard-boiled cyber­punk cops Deb­bie Decay and Led Dent brings them to the last cor­ner of green­ery on the face of the Earth, in the ​“gar­den-nation” of an expand­ed Tokyo.

Judg­ing by the high-tech aspect mixed with Asian aes­thet­ic sig­ni­fiers, this all smacks of Ghost in the Shell or the Blade Run­ner films, both fine for a Square One in chart­ing the look of a big-bud­get stu­dio release. The spir­it of the orig­i­nal text should be remain intact, as the comics’ writer Rick Remender has been tapped for the screen­play reshap­ing his own work.

The good news is that when­ev­er Tokyo Ghost gets around to a release, we’ll most like­ly see it in the­aters; Leg­endary tends to part­ner with Warn­er Bros for dis­tri­b­u­tion, and ear­li­er this week, the Warn­ers announced that their con­tro­ver­sial day-and-date simul­ta­ne­ous drops in the­aters and stream­ing would not con­tin­ue past 2021.

A big, loud, expen­sive, col­or­ful movie, seen just as it should be? Nor­mal­cy may be clos­er than it feels.