After spending nearly six years trapped inside the Hollywood system, attempting to hack its way into the brains of various filmmakers, the adaptation of Ghost In The Shell is once again moving toward gaining a real, scantily clad human form. Deadline reports that Snow White And The Huntsman director Rupert Sanders has made a new deal with DreamWorks to develop the latest of several adaptation attempts on the popular manga, a crime thriller that takes place in a near-future world where people have fused with technology—but in a far sexier way than Google Glass. Sanders will work from a new script by William Wheeler (The Hoax), who in turn replaces the one by Shutter Island writer Laeta Kalogridis, who replaced Street Kings writer Jamie Moss.
As Ghost In The Shell passed through each of these minds without achieving the next step in its evolution, plenty of other live-action manga adaptations have similarly been announced, many of them also lost within the grid: Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Death Notice, etc. There’s also The Matrix, which borrowed so explicitly from Ghost In The Shell’s themes and aesthetics, it’s practically already an adaptation. Nevertheless, Ghost has remained “fueled by the personal passion of Steven Spielberg” for years now. It remains to be seen whether that’s still enough to push it through the tangled web of Sanders’ many other scheduled projects, so that Ghost In The Shell may at last be reborn in a white, American body.