‘My Hero Academia’ Mangaka Kohei Horikoshi Heavily Involved With Live-Action Netflix Film: “There’s Nothing That He Doesn’t Give Notes On”
After ostensibly learning from both Cowboy Bebop and One Piece that ‘collaborating with a given work’s original creator’ is far more conductive to an adaptation’s success than letting random studio writers and execs ‘do their own thing’, Netflix has made it a point to actively run just about every production decision related to their live-action My Hero Academia film past its original mangaka Kohei Horikoshi.
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This insight into Deku’s upcoming silver screen adventure was provided by the film’s writer, Jason Fuchs, during a recent interview given to Entertainment Weekly‘s Nick Romano in promotion of HBO’s soon-to-premiere IT: Welcome to Derry, for which he serves as its co-creator and co-showrunner.
Met with the observation from Romano that Netflix’s track record of live-action adaptations has been ‘shaky’ at best, with rare gems like One Piece, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Alice in Borderlands outnumbered by disasters like Cowboy Bebop, Death Note (2017), Bet (itself an adaptation of Kakegurui), and the Fullmetal Alchemist trilogy, Fuchs admitted that he was rather confident that My Hero Academia would fall into the former category rather than the latter, particularly as “We have creators who are present. [Horikoshi] is very involved.”
“There’s no treatment, there’s no outline, there’s no scenes, there’s no nothing that Kohei doesn’t give notes on, react to [with] thumbs up, thumbs down,” he asserted. “That makes me feel really confident that we’re gonna deliver something that fans, like myself, feel great about.”
Noting that the film was still “very early” in its development process, Fuchs then exaplined that when translating the manga to the silver screen, he was most concerned with capturing the ‘spirit’ and character of the series’ various heroes and villains.
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“You want to do something that feels authentic to the material. You want to do something that fans feel respects the canon and the original, but also find an access point for people who’ve never read [the manga], who’s never seen the first films.
“[Deku] is a young man who is in that 20 percent of quirk-less people in a world where everyone has something special. You connect with him so quickly. You connect with all these characters. Being faithful to those characters informs all of it.”
Originally beginning life in 2018 under Legendary Entertainment, the rights to produce a live-action My Hero Academia film were eventually sold to Netflix in December 2022, who initially tapped Obi-Wan Kenobi and Transformers: Rise of the Beast writer Joby Harold to pens it script before hiring Fuchs rewrite the entire thing this past September.
Ultimately, whether or not the film actually gives Horikoshi’s work the respect it deserves, or ever actually comes out, remains to be seen – and while One Piece has proven Netflix is full of surprises when it comes to adapting Japanese material, fans would do best to keep their hopes tempered until they actually see the final product and they can confirm its quality for themselves.
