Netflix Announces Live-Action ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Series

Netflix has been stepping up its effort on the anime front, and just dropped a bomb of an announcement today: They have given an order for a 10 episode live-action ‘Cowboy Bebop’ series.

For the uninitiated out there, ‘Cowboy Bebop’ is what you would call an “OG” of anime. Widely considered to be one of the greatest anime of all time and for good reason. If you consider yourself a fan of anime, watching Cowboy Bebop is a rite of passage. Given ‘Cowboy Bebop’s’ legendary status within anime circles, you would think that everyone would be ecstatic about this announcement, right? Well, not exactly.

For starters, just like video game adaptations, live-action films and TV shows based on anime/manga have not done well. There’s the recent ‘Ghost in the Shell’ live-action film starring Scarlet Johansson, which wasn’t a complete disappointment, but not a good film either. Then of course there’s the live-action films of ‘Dragon Ball’ and ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’ Films so bad they you’d couldn’t be paid to watch them. And last, but not least, there was Netflix’s own live-action ‘Death Note’ movie, which was nearly universally panned.

Considering ‘Death Note’ was a Netflix exclusive, fans of ‘Cowboy Bebop’ have every reason to have reservations about a live-action series from Netflix. Could it be good? Yes. But Netflix’s track record with original anime and anime-inspired content has been pretty bad so far, so the streaming service has a lot to prove with this one. And if they mess it up, they will annoy a lot of anime fans.