In a brief flurry of publicity last year, Dreamworks picked up the rights to Masamune Shirow's Ghost in the Shell. Steven Spielberg gushed about its wonderfulness (he's right) and Jamie Moss (Street Kings) was put to work on the screenplay.
The rest was silence, but now it emerges that a new draft is being prepared by Laeta Kalogridis, hot from adapting Dennis Lehane's novel **Shutter Island **for Martin Scorsese. Avi and Ari Arad are still attached as producers on what's destined to be a live-action 3D (natch) action epic.
No director or explicit story details yet, but we'd guess that, like the 1995 anime, the new Ghost in the Shell will home in on the mindbending Puppetmaster plot thread, about, more or less, a government-created super-AI gone rogue.
Mad action, cyborg-enhanced cops and spider-like mecha-tanks (and lots and lots of boobs) ought to make for massive, jawdropping spectacle. But so much of Ghost in the Shell has already been plundered by The Matrix (among others), we wonder whether, entirely unfairly, it'll already seem derivative if and when it reaches the screen. Your thoughts?