Original ‘Hellboy’ Screenwriter Reveals Scrapped Plans For Live-Action ‘Lupin III’ Starring Jim Carrey
In making one of the most unexpected reveals in the entirety of anime’s Hollywood history, original Hellboy screenwriter Peter Briggs has let slip that at around the same time he was penning the script to said comic book film, he was also hard at work on an ultimately unrealized, live-action adaptation of Kazuhiko “Monkey Punch” Katō’s seminal manga Lupin III starring none other than Jim Carrey as the titular thief.
The noted industry script doctor blew the lid off the long-dead project’s existence, completely unprompted, on August 4th via his personal Bluesky account.
Taking notice of a recommendation from YouTuber Bob ‘MovieBob’ Chipman that audiences check out the 1987 Chinese horror classic A Chinese Ghost Story when it returns to theaters later this year as part of GKIDS’ Hong Kong Cinema Classics film series due to “how many things you’ve seen borrow from it”, Briggs recalled that he had once had the pleasure of working with said film’s producer, Tsui Hark, as well as “Oliver Stone’s producer, A. Kitman Ho, back in 1997”.
In his next breath, the writer dropped the bombshell that the project was “A live action adaption of Lupin III, that we would have done with Jim Carrey.”
“Alex Ho (lovely, lovely man) ended up losing the rights, so it never happened,” he then explained in regards to the film never seeing the light of day. “Craziest screenplay I ever wrote!”
And though he met initial surprise from fans with the note that “I’ve done podcasts over the years talking about Hellboy, Alien vs Predator, Judge Dredd, War Of The Worlds (2005), Freddy vs Jason, other things I’ve been hired to write on. Certainly mentioned this along the way,” Briggs still proceeded to provide curious fans with details as to what the film’s contents would have entailed.
“There’s bit of everything from Lupin in there. Bits of The Mystery of Mamo, [The Hayao Miyazaki-directed Lupin the 3rd Part 2 (1977) episode] Wings Of Death – Albatross, The Castle of Cagliostro. But a big, BIG storyline. No Lupin animated has even come close to the scale of craziness we had in our screenplay. I was surprised when I saw [the 2019 CGI animated film] Lupin III: The First: some of our stuff was in it.”
“It had a flashback heist in Paris with Lupin’s Pop, a theft from the White House, a scene set in Antarctica with Fujiko, the theft of the Crown Jewels in London by robots, a fight in an underground lair in Paris, another heist in Venice, a robots vs Lupin car chase in Morocco —
“– Ninjas vs Goemon in a monastery, an Illuminati Flying Saucer abducting the Orient Express, an INSANE seaplane climax on Mount Everest…and that barely scratches the surface. It was BIG. I wrote it at the same time I was doing Hellboy, and it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown!
“No [he wasn’t straight faced], there was a lot of Lupin being quite goofy. Lupin’s interesting to chart across the various anime over the decades. Sometimes he’s charming, sometimes he’s insane, sometimes he’s hard-edged and sadistic. There’s a lot of inconsistency of tone, just down to the different writers and directors.”
“They said to me ‘Jim Carrey’, so I nodded and went off to write.”
Asked for a rough synopsis of the film’s events, Briggs detailed, “After breaking into the White House to steal a valuable bottle of wine his father had himself stolen years ago (gifted to the U.S. President by accident) Lupin finds himself vying with Fujiko to discover the secret of why a shadowy Illuminati actually running the world want this bottle so badly…
He also noted that, rather than as its producer, Hark was actually attached as the film’s director, with the two having had one meeting in Paris.
“His English was nonexistent,” said the writer, “and Alex Ho (the producer, himself Chinese) had to translate over lunch.”
Ultimately, though the project never came to light, Briggs confirmed that he “would LOVE to resurrect it as a two-part Japanese animated cartoon.”
“If any of the Lupin fan community have an ‘in’ with whoever’s handling Monkey Punch stuff these days, have them call Alex [Kitman Ho] or myself, and we’ll get the ball rolling,” he declared. “I’ll happily work with the Japanese writers to finesse it.”
However, despite his continued interest in bringing their live-action Lupin III to the big screen, Briggs admits that he’d make at least one change to its script, telling a fan “If I were to rewrite it to rewrite it 28 years later, I’d want to hack out about 50 percent of the humor. I may have overcompensated. My agent at the time said that it was very Men In Black in humor-tone.”
