Battle Angel Alita Live-Action, After Avatar 2

That's not to say immediately after Avatar 2, as there should still be an Avatar 3 to complete the trilogy. But certainly after Avatar 2, at some point, mister James 'Slowpoke' Cameron is expected to finally bring his vision of Battle Angel Alita into a live-action movie. One that he's been talking about since 2002, if Google's cached memory serves us right. And one of the very few anime-to-live-action adaptations that stands a real chance at awesomeness. You see, we've had this throbbing thing for ass-kicking lolis, ever since Chocolate...



The latest report on this topic came a couple of days ago from producer Jon Landau, who also confessed his and Cameron's initial ignorance towards the Battle Angel Alita franchise - better known as Gunnm in Japan. As it turns out, it was filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) who brought it to Cameron's attention. And later, screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis "opened them up" to the original manga's complete series of 9 volumes, since they had only bothered to skip through one book at first. And that's not counting the 12 volumes of the sequel / alternate story manga Gunnm: Last Order. So now you see why Avatar came first...

Once they're done with their required reading and move into full production, Cameron & co. will probably promote the movie as simply "Battle Angel", dropping Alita's name from the title. Although producer Landau sure likes to joke about it:

"I'm telling people that we have to call it 'Alita: Battle Angel', because Jim only does T&A movies: 'Titanic', 'Aliens', 'Terminator', 'Abyss', 'True Lies', 'Avatar'. So, we can't call it 'Battle Angel'. We have to call it 'Alita: Battle Angel'."

Ha-ha... Anyway, the original manga was created by Yukito Kishiro, and its sole anime adaptation was released in 1993 as a 2-episode OVA. The story takes place in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world, where human nerve tissue has become the most precious commodity, and a mysterious city called Zalem (or Tiphares in the original book) floats high above the hellish Scrapyard. It's down there that doc Ido finds the remains of a female cyborg, miraculously preserved in a junk heap. After he revives and rebuilds her in the image of a young woman, she starts to rediscover the long-forgotten fighting techniques hidden in her body, and decides to become a hunter-warrior like Ido. The unnaturally strong, yet amnesiac Alita (known as Gally in the Japanese version) thus begins to forge a life for herself in a world where every day is a struggle for survival.