For​tune​.com have just recently pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Animé Explo­sion”.

“From Poké­mon to Full Metal Panic, the animé indus­try is doing every­thing the rest of show biz isn’t: embrac­ing tech­nol­ogy, cod­dling fans—and mak­ing a killing.”

Daniel Roth dis­cusses the cur­rent state of the animé indus­try in the west, the approach to piracy, new tech­nol­ogy and fanat­i­cal otaku. The arti­cle cen­tres on John Led­ford, CEO of AD Vision; pri­mar­ily his busi­ness strate­gies, his encoun­ters with fans at his door at 2am and of course, the live action Evan­ge­lion movie. The arti­cle goes on to men­tion fan-subbers, the enter­tain­ment indus­try and var­i­ous ADV acqui­si­tions. In dis­cussing otaku (extreme animé fanat­ics), Roth gives brief men­tion of the live action evan­ge­lion situation:

“Since 2003 [Ledford’s] been shop­ping the idea of mak­ing a live-action ver­sion of Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion, […] Led­ford signed on the Weta Com­pa­nies, […] to come up with plans for what the Evan­ge­lion world might look like. But instead of micro­manag­ing the project, Led­ford had Weta answer to two Evan­ge­lion fanat­ics at his company.”

Through bad­ger­ing and exten­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Weta it shows that ADV are tak­ing this film very seri­ously. This isn’t going to be a cheap knock off; ADV sim­ply can­not afford to offend the great major­ity of their cus­tomers. And to that means it seems they want to do things right, with or with­out Hideaki Anno.

“Richard Tay­lor, Weta’s co-founder, says he’s never expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it. Twice a week he’d have a con­fer­ence call with the fans at ADV, send­ing them ren­der­ings of his designs for things like the 100-foot-tall robots and get­ting in return their ency­clo­pe­dic take on the inter­pre­ta­tions. “These are peo­ple who could be con­sid­ered schol­ars on the world of Evan­ge­lion,” says Tay­lor. “We had to appease them and find their approval.”

It fol­lows on to men­tion a meet­ing between Tay­lor and a pro­posed pro­ducer at the San Diego Comic-Con in an attempt to ‘jump-start’ the pro­duc­tion. Bud­get­ing is also men­tioned and it seems ADV has raised $100m of the $120 mil­lion they need.

The fans are also mak­ing them­selves heard – a lot. Even more so than those who enjoyed Lord of the Rings:

“We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of let­ters from peo­ple around the world about Lord of the Rings. But we get 25 e-mails about Evan­ge­lion to every one we get about Lord of the Rings,” says Tay­lor. “And Evan­ge­lion has not even been made yet.”

A fan even con­sulted Tay­lor dur­ing his meet­ing with the pro­ducer, ask­ing whether or not any­thing was being done about the movie:

Tay­lor turned to the pro­ducer and said, “This is why we have to do this movie.”

Source: For​tune​.com
Thanks to Derek

From Active Animé:

“On August 7 of this year, we informed all of you that the live action adap­ta­tion of Evan­ge­lion was alive and well, and that the infor­ma­tion that we received came from ADV Films David Del Rio.

“This time around, I asked the same ques­tion to Matt Green­field right after the Godan­nar screen­ing. As we all know, Matt Green­field is the one that’s head­ing the live action adap­ta­tion project of Evangelion.

“When I ask Matt, he gave me an enthu­si­as­tic thumb up, and said “Yes”. He added the he is plan­ning of vis­it­ing Weta Work­shop to find out what project they’re cur­rently work­ing on, and to see if there are changes to be made while in New Zealand in October.”

Active Animé have posted a small news snip­pet dis­cussing the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of the Evan­ge­lion movie after meet­ing with Del Rio, Cre­ative Direc­tor for ADV Films.

He says that the movie is still Live and well and that ADV are tak­ing their time to make sure the movie is as envi­sioned. It also men­tions that Weta are cur­rently busy with King Kong, but appar­ently there may be some changes to the con­cept art once pro­duc­tion begins. Del Rio is also hop­ing for a 2/3 movie deal.

Triv­ial Being forum mem­ber Legion has picked up the lat­est issue of Neo, a british animé pub­li­ca­tion. The full arti­cle scan can be found here: Forum Topic.

To sum­marise the arti­cle, it sim­ply states that the live action evan­ge­lion project is cur­rently on hold accord­ing to the Weta web­site (we already knew this). No major news, just an announce­ment in print.

Nick Buras has kindly informed me that Weta have updated their web­site and have included the Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion live action movie as a ‘cur­rent project’:

Weta Work­shop Eva Project Page

As for the sta­tus of the project, which every­one has been con­cerned due to the lack of any for­mi­da­ble news: UNDER DEVELOPMENT -

QUOTE: “Weta has been design­ing a live-action adap­ta­tion of Neon Gen­e­sis: Evan­ge­lion. The film is on hold but it is Weta’s hope that it will enjoy get­ting to work on the film pro­duc­tion of this amaz­ing story in the near future.”

The site also con­tains a flash rep­re­sen­ta­tion of all their con­cept work so far, no pic­tures that can­not be found here although it does con­firm that they cre­ated the rogue image found only in a japan­ese new­type mag­a­zine, (Image). In the image descrip­tions the char­ac­ters are given their cor­rect titles.

ADV have launched a new sec­tion of their web­site ded­i­cated to their the­atri­cal releases.

ADV The­atri­cal Division

Quote: ADV Films, the #1 producer-distributor of animé in the U.S., today announced that they are expand­ing the ADV Films web­site to include a page ded­i­cated to the company’s the­atri­cal releases (www​.adv​films​.com/​t​h​e​a​t​r​i​cal).

The new web­site, with an empha­sis on Japan­ese and Korean films, offers a one-stop infor­ma­tion source for both film buffs and the­atre pro­fes­sion­als, pro­vid­ing back­ground mate­r­ial on each film as well as list­ings of the­atres and play dates for cur­rent show­ings. The­atre man­agers and pub­li­cists are able to down­load press mate­ri­als, includ­ing biogra­phies, cast and crew lists, inter­views and art work for each film. Film buy­ers have the abil­ity to check out ADV Theatrical’s release sched­ule as well as a chance to see what films are avail­able in 35 mm from ADV’s library, such as the clas­sic Gam­era series.

This expan­sion of the web site comes at time when the cin­ema world is focus­ing on the Korean film mak­ing indus­try. Richard Pena, Direc­tor of the New York Film Fes­ti­val and cura­tor of the Korean Film ret­ro­spec­tive at Lin­coln Cen­ter recently stated “With recent major fes­ti­val awards at Cannes and Venice, the cin­ema of South Korea has become one of the most respected, and eagerly antic­i­pated, national cin­e­mas any­where today.”

“This new page is a wel­come addi­tion to our web site” said John Led­ford, pres­i­dent, CEO and co-founder of ADV Films. “Our animé web site has always been very pop­u­lar with our fans and I know that our the­atri­cal page will be also.”

Offi­cial Announce­ment — source

Alright, so ADV has appointed a man named Steven Buck as the Direc­tor of the up-and-coming the­atri­cal divi­sion of ADV (which would, of course, be com­pro­mised of only the Evan­ge­lion project as far as I know, there may be other projects we don’t know about!). Just as a note: this is NOT stat­ing that he is the direc­tor of Evan­ge­lion… they still haven’t cho­sen, or have not released the information…

But, since Buck will be head of the the­atrics, I tried to do a bit of back-ground research on him only to fall short (though I really only checked on imdb). Do any of you know any­thing about him rather than the fact that he founded art-house movie theatres?

At the King Records/Production IG panel at Otakon 2004, Okazaki, when asked about the live action Eva movie, stated that King Records was not involved in it and that they “weren’t very happy about it.”

King Records owns the Star Child label that han­dles dis­tri­b­u­tion and licens­ing for alot of animé titles. They han­dled Japan­ese dis­tri­b­u­tion for Evan­ge­lion and the movies. They also released all of the Japan­ese Eva soundtracks.

Source: http://​www​.ani​me​news​net​work​.com/​c​o​n​v​e​n​t​i​o​n​.​p​h​p​?​i​d​=​189