After initially having Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man) set to direct the live-action adaptation of Your Name, Paramount Pictures, Bad Robot Productions and Toho have shifted gears and tapped Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) to rewrite and direct the new take on Makoto Shinkai’s acclaimed anime, according to Deadline.
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Chung, who first found acclaim with his 2007 debut Munyurangabo at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, will be working off the most recent draft of the script penned by Emily V. Gordon (The Big Sick), who was in turn working off the original draft written by Arrival‘s Eric Heisserer.
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Released in Japan in 2016 and in the US in 2017, the story centers on Tokyo highschooler Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu from the rural Itomori, who discover they have the ability to switch bodies with one another and as a natural disaster threatens to destroy their lives, they must journey to meet each other and save their worlds before it’s too late. It became a runaway success upon its release, grossing over $303 million in Japan alone, becoming one of the country’s biggest hits and spawning a bidding war when the rights to multimedia adaptations hit the market in 2017.
Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) is set to produce the film alongside Genki Kawamura, a producer on the original project, with Toho handling Japanese distribution of the film and Paramount distributing it to all other territories.
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Following his 2007 acclaimed debut and a handful of acclaimed indie dramas, Chung recently returned with the A24 and Plan B Entertainment-produced Minari, which won the Grand Jury and Dramatic Audience Awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
(Photo Credit: Rich Fury/Getty Images)
