After months of speculation, it looks like Scarlett Johannson will be booting up her cyberbrain in the live action remake of acclaimed anime Ghost in the Shell.
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According to the Hollywood Reporter, the thirty year-old actress will take the lead in the Rupert Sanders-helmed vehicle. Sanders previously directed the visually great but ultimately frustrating Snow White and the Huntsman, another female-led action film that was fairly successful at the box office.
No word on how faithful the script by Bill Wheeler will be. Ghost in the Shell has seen many different versions, both in anime and manga, over the years. The story was first a graphic novel series that debuted in 1988, while the1995 anime movie is the most well known. All iterations follow Motoko Kusanagi, a cybernetically enhanced police officer in cyber-punk futuristic city.
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Johannson was offered $10 million for the role and frankly, it’s a perfect match. No other actress in Hollywood can spearhead an action vehicle, as the recent meteoric success of Lucy has shown, and she possesses a strange, ethereal presence that is perfect for a character that is essentially just a living brain inside a cybernetic body (the titular ‘shell’).
If you need more proof of her 'strange' bona fides, and Ghost in the Shell is quite strange, you should immediately seek out Under The Skin. I should not say much more than that, but know that it is essentially an audition to play a character that is almost, but not quite, human.
Actress Margot Robbie was also in talks for the role, but she has since been snatched up to play Harley Quinn in DC’s Suicide Squad movie. I think we can all agree that the right people landed in the right roles for both of those films.
Ghost in the Shell is currently undergoing pre-production at Dreamworks. No date has been set.