Ohay­ocon attendee Chris Adkins has been in touch to inform us that the stu­dio dis­cus­sions and fight for final rights of the Evan­ge­lion adap­ta­tion prop­er­ties are in the midst of tak­ing place, with every­thing still going ahead given the suc­cess of that other big robot movie, Trans­form­ers. Joseph Cho is in charge of the the Gainax/Studio rela­tions and Matt Green­field is hop­ing for some offi­cial announce­ments some­time in the next 9 months.

It cer­tainly is good to see some news, but we really want that announce­ment ASAP, we’re all still wait­ing with bated breath.

The News: In an Evan­ge­lion panel at the Ohay­ocon animé con­ven­tion in Colum­bus Ohio on Jan­u­ary 30th, ADV direc­tor Matt Green­field announced that sev­eral U.S. stu­dios are com­pet­ing for final rights to the project, mean­ing that actual pro­duc­tion should begin soon. The delay on the project is due largely to the Trans­form­ers movie: The stu­dios wanted to make sure that a “giant robot” movie would appeal to an Amer­i­can audi­ence. The nego­ti­a­tions between the U.S. stu­dios and Gainax are being han­dled by Joseph Cho, who assisted in the pro­duc­tion of “Apple­seed: Ex Machina”, an ani­mated film based on the Apple­seed series, so Mr. Cho has pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence in deal­ing with stu­dio types.

Matt Green­field esti­mates that an offi­cial announce­ment, includ­ing nam­ing the stu­dio, the direc­tor, and per­haps cast­ing infor­ma­tion, would be made within the next 9 months.

Thanks Chris!

At the Well­gin­ton Armaged­don Pop Cul­ture Con, Richard Tay­lor spoke about his enthu­si­asm for the Evan­ge­lion live action movie with a fan:

Thanks Tino!

Triv­ial Being min­ion darthikari attended a panel at Animé Cen­tral (acen) this week­end. When the Evan­ge­lion live action project came up, Matt Green­field said that the movie is still hap­pen­ing, and that Weta and undis­closed “big names” are still on board, but that he could still not announce any details.

The only news here is that the sta­tus of the Evan­ge­lion live action movie(s) seems unchanged by the announe­ment of the four-movie ani­mated re-make by Gainax.

More info on the ADV panel (with­out the live action news) here: ANN: Animé Cen­tral 2007: ADV Films

Dis­cus­sion thread: acen update

UPDATE: The issue, although not out yet, has sur­faced on the inter­net with full page scans, albeit in japan­ese of course. Whilst no live action movie scoop, the news is still very big and con­cerns a “rebuild­ing” of Evan­ge­lion in the form of 4 new movies, the first due out next Sum­mer (in Japan). A large amount of new mate­r­ial is expected in this project enti­tled “Evan­ge­lion Shin Gek­i­jou Ban”. Check out our forum thread for all the details: New­type Scans Discussion

Just a quick note to say that the next New­type issue will con­tain a big scoop con­cern­ing Evan­ge­lion (or so is adver­tised in Japan’s Sep­tem­ber issue), whether this per­tains to the live action movie is unsure. How­ever given that a big announce­ment is due it is quite pos­si­ble we may hear some sub­stan­tial and impor­tant news con­cern­ing the movie within the next month. Let’s cross our fingers.

Some spec­u­la­tion as to what else it could be includes a pos­si­ble new Hideaki Anno project as rumored at ANN.

For fur­ther rumors and dis­cus­sion con­cern­ing the “scoop” Eva Mon­key makes some good points with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to the pos­si­bil­ity of new Evan­ge­lion animé.

Noth­ing new to see, just more con­fir­ma­tion that every­thing is still being worked upon behind the scenes, as announced at the Animé Boston 2006 expo:

“ADV also made sev­eral con­fir­ma­tions dur­ing the panel. The biggest and most excit­ing of them all was that the Live Action Evan­ge­lion Movie is con­firmed and is going through pre-production.” -Krazy Gamers

Thanks Camarokris

Well there hasn’t been much news of late and many of us still have our fin­gers crossed, oth­ers are prais­ing and remain hope­ful the movie will never see the light of day. A lot of vis­i­tors have sub­mit­ted the lat­est com­ments from Matt Green­field which have appeared at Active Animé. He stated that half of the movies’ bud­get had been raised and that three ‘top A list direc­tors’ were inline and com­pet­ing for the chance to direct. Still no idea as to when pro­duc­tion will start, mainly due to Weta Workshop’s involve­ment in the Halo movie live action adap­ta­tion which will soon commence.

In February’s Animé Insider there is a small Arti­cle on The Eva Movie. It doesn’t seem to have any new info but I belive it’s the lat­est printed mate­r­ial on it. Here’s a quote.

“The Project has moved slowly in the years since, but ADV remains com­mit­ted. Accord­ing to a recent arti­cle in For­tune mag­a­zine, ADV has raised half of the $120 mil­lion deemed nec­es­sary for the film, and Weta’s Oscar-winning visual-effects artist Richard Tay­lor has pro­fessed his sin­cere desire to see a live-action Evan­ge­lion. The film may be far from fin­ished, but ADV Pres­i­dent John Led­ford main­tains that it’s still very much alive.
’It would be fool­ish to spec­u­late on when we’ll be ready to move for­ward, since it’s not so much a mat­ter of rais­ing money but mak­ing sure all the other pieces are in place,’ stated Led­ford. ‘It’s mad­den­ing for the fans, but that’s the way it works’”

IGN have pub­lished an arti­cle con­cern­ing the live action evan­ge­lion movie adap­ta­tion. It focuses on Richard Tay­lor, head of Weta Work­shop, and his thoughts and plans for the movie.

Tay­lor: “I’ve just been to Japan pur­su­ing this, […] I think that is the great untold story to the world. It is sub­lime. It is arguably some of the most beau­ti­ful and poignant ani­ma­tion ever cre­ated, and a huge per­cent­age of the pop cul­ture world now know it, but only through a live-action fea­ture film will it tran­scend that and receive the recog­ni­tion for the art piece that it is.”

Richard Tay­lor, who views the animé as an exquis­ite art piece wants this film to be made right — so much so that he him­self will guide the pro­duc­tion and over­see the entire process.

“Now, actu­ally achiev­ing it as a live-action fea­ture film is extremely dif­fi­cult to imag­ine. Tech­no­log­i­cally, sure, it’s doable. But at an eso­teric, uni­verse level, it is an unbe­liev­ably impact­ing and dra­matic story con­cept. [It’s got] pseudo-religious over­tones, and all these won­der­ful motifs are woven into it. It’s some­thing that you can gen­er­ate over 26 hours of ani­ma­tion, but try­ing to encap­su­late that down into a fea­ture film would be a mas­sive chal­lenge. But … with the right direc­tor, I think it could be a very beau­ti­ful movie. …And that’s my big pur­suit at the moment. I’ve put an awful lot of energy into it.”

With a man like this behind the wheel we should all have some con­fi­dence. Tay­lor is ded­i­cated to the cause and he is unlikely to sell out or make unimag­in­able blun­ders as this film is a direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his com­pany. But most impor­tantly he is some­body that loves the orig­i­nal animé; this Evan­ge­lion film could still be some­thing great.

“We’ll be blessed just to work on it. But it would be an oppor­tu­nity for us to look at it at a dif­fer­ent level if [Weta helped pro­duce the movie].”

Source: IGN: Weta Head hopes to Co-produce Evan­ge­lion
Thanks to Chris Davis and ‘The Dit’