It has been more than a year since Lee Isaac Chung exited his directorial duties in Paramount Pictures’ Your Name movie, and now it looks like the studio has finally found its new director. According to Variety, Raya and the Last Dragon filmmaker Carlos López Estrada has been tapped to helm the live-action film adaptation of Makoto Shinkai’s hit fantasy anime.
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In addition to directing, López Estrada is also currently writing the screenplay, based on Oscar-nominated scribe Eric Heisserer’s first draft. The Mexican filmmaker first gained recognition for his acclaimed feature directorial debut Blindspotting. He’s also working with Disney for a brand live-action adaptation of Robin Hood.
The live-action Your Name movie hails from Paramount Pictures, Bad Robot Productions, and Toho. It will be produced by Bad Robot’s J.J. Abrams and original producer Genki Kawamura. Toho is set to handle the Japanese distribution of the film and Paramount distributing it to all other territories. López Estrada is the third director to be attached to the project following Chung and Marc Webb. Apart from Heisserer, The Big Sick writer Emily V. Gordon was also previously enlisted to pen the script.
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First released in Japan in 2016 and in the US in 2017, Your Name is a romantic fantasy movie centered around Tokyo high schooler Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu from the rural Itomori, who discover they have the ability to switch bodies with one another. 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.
Since its debut, it was an instant success with a gross of over $303 million in Japan alone and became one of the country’s biggest hits. Because of this, a bidding war arose when the rights to multimedia adaptations hit the market in 2017.
