Speak­ing to MTV at a recent press event, Keanu Reeves revealed a bit about the progress of the Bebop movie. The first draft of the adap­ta­tion is com­plete, and although described as ‘fan­tas­tic’, it was ulti­mately too expen­sive to make. It is being reworked into some­thing a bit more producible.

“There’s a draft of the script, but the writer did such a great job [that] in order to make the movie, you would need half a bil­lion dollars.”

…
How­ever, Reeves indi­cated that the writer’s adher­ence to the galaxy-spanning adven­ture of the full entire series might prove a lit­tle daunt­ing for production.

“So the stu­dio went, ‘This movie is fan­tas­tic and it would cost half a bil­lion dol­lars,” laughed Reeves, “so he’s doing a rewrite.”

…
“The only chal­lenge was to make a sat­is­fy­ing west­ern nar­ra­tive out of the kind of sto­ry­telling that hap­pens,” he added. “There’s a great draft, so we’re just try­ing to pull it back a lit­tle bit now.”

Thanks Nick!