Daily Times

Bullet Train will surely be number one-with a bullet-at the box office this weekend. How could it not be, with a cast that includes Brad Pitt, Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny, Brian Tyree Henry, and Joey King, and with stuntman/action director David Leitch (John Wick, Deadpool 2) behind the camera? The film is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood productions that were either inspired by Japanese stories or were straight-up adaptations of Japanese properties.
Suffice it to say that Bullet Train isn’t the first Hollywood film with origins in Japan. Here’s a look at Tinseltown’s takes on a handful of other projects-some that began as books, and others that found success first on film in their native language. In each case, the power of these stories transcends (or at least tests) geographic and cultural boundaries as much as it benefits from them.

Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla (2014): The great fire-breathing behemoth Godzilla has always been synonymous with Japan, though Hollywood was attracted to the creature’s destructive power almost from the beginning of the franchise: Three years after the original release, Raymond Burr was added to the Japanese film for a 1956 hybrid production called Godzilla, King Of The Monsters! for a U.S. release. But it wasn’t until 1998 that Hollywood actually decided to make its own Godzilla film. By then, of course, the Atomic Age paranoia that inspired the original-and the powerful sorrow that oozes out of its story-was long since forgotten, leaving behind only empty spectacle. Roland Emmerich’s film was rightly panned in 1998, but Gareth Edwards got more right with his version of the story in 2014, which of course led to a “monsterverse” that introduced other creatures -both friend and foe.

Ghost In The Shell (2017): Japanese manga and anime series have served as launching pads for several Hollywood productions. The Wachowskis’ colorful, highly stylized box-office dud Speed Racer was based on Mach GoGoGo, the Speed Racer manga and animated series from the 1960s. Ghost In The Shell, a hugely popular manga, sparked a cottage industry of films, games, and shows in Japan and the U.S. Unfortunately, the mega-film version starring Scarlett Johansson elicited awful reviews and bombed at the box office. And then there’s Alita: Battle Angel, based on the manga title Gunnm. Even an epic team-up between James Cameron (producer and co-writer) and Robert Rodriguez (director) couldn’t nudge this visually stunning adaptation into blockbuster territory.

Edge Of Tomorrow (2014): Many fans of the Tom Cruise hit Edge Of Tomorrow don’t realize that it was derived from a Japanese book, the young-adult sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, published in 2004. Later, in 2014, the book was morphed into a manga in Japan, an English-language graphic novel in America, and also director Doug Liman’s pulse-pounding film. Edge Of Tomorrow, which plays like an alien invasion version of Groundhog Day, with Cruise’s character, Major William Cage, time looping and repeatedly dying until he-with an assist from the ass-kicking Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt)-saves the day.

Silence (2016): Martin Scorsese co-wrote and directed Silence, a drama based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Sh?sakuEnd?. In it, two Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) try to spread the message of Catholic Christianity in Japan while also attempting to locate their mentor (Liam Neeson). The book had previously gotten the adaptation treatment. Japanese writer-director Masahiro Shinoda collaborated with Endo on the script of an acclaimed 1971 film also called Silence. Scorsese’s ambitious, nearly three-hour-long version elicited mostly positive reviews, but it ranks among the filmmaker’s least successful titles at the U.S. box office, barely cracking the $7 million mark.