Although I haven't ever seen any of director Alexandre Aja's films (High Tension, Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, Piranha 3D - I know, I need to!) he's got one project I'm now quite excited about. He's been doing horror for a while and has had some success, but I've been hoping we would see him branch out into even more genres. So it's no surprise to hear via Deadline that Alex Aja has just been granted the rights to adapt the Japanese manga Cobra the Space Pirate into a "tent pole-sized live action franchise." Aja will be writing the script with Grégory Levasseur (High Tension, Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors, P2) and also producing with Levasseur.
Cobra, as it was known in Japan, is a space-opera manga series written & illustrated by Buichi Terasawa, originally running from 1978 to 1984. In a future where merchant spaceships and ruthless brigands sail across space, Cobra is a notorious rogue pirate whose refusal to align with the United Galaxies Federation or the Pirates Guild puts him on the business end of a huge bounty. As he tries to keep his identity secret and avoid capture, Cobra teams up with a sexy bounty hunter named Jane, who is out to locate her sisters and decode a treasure map tattooed on their backs. Their goal: to liberate a lost treasure on Mars. I haven't ever heard of this series before, but I love sci-fi space operas and would love to see Aja tackle a space epic.
"I grew up dreaming about Cobra," Aja told Deadline. "For many people there is Star Wars and nothing else, but for me and my writing partner Gregory, there is Star Wars and Cobra... There are 60 books, a lot of TV animation and so many adventures, pirates and bad guys that it is perfect to be reinvented into a really cool space opera adventure franchise for a new generation." The only part of all this news I'm hesitant about is this: "It should be in 3D, science fiction and 3D are a good mix," Aja says. "I'll start work on the script soon, but I have been carrying this inside me for 30 years and we are talking to the creature designers of films like Avatar and Star Trek, building a new world and doing it the right way." Okay, now I'm sold, bring it on!
