Jolly Roger announces “Wangan Midnight: The Movie”
Posted by Kevin Ouellette on April 27, 2009 6:05pm EDT (3 years ago)
Filed under: Action, Future releases, Movie announcements
On Monday film company Jolly Roger held a press conference at Bellsalle Roppongi to announce the production of a live-action film based on Michiharu Kusunoki’s long-running manga serial, Wangan Midnight. Stars Yuichi Nakamura (D-BOYS), Kazuki Kato, Masaki Sada, and Kosuke Yonehara were in attendance along with the film’s director, Atsushi Muroga (Score, Super Cub).
10 straight-to-video movies were based on the series between 1991 and 2001, but instead of carrying anything over from those Muroga and screenwriter Yasutoshi Murakawa concentrated on creating a script based on the first 3 volumes of the original story. According to Jolly Roger, an initial pilot was filmed for Kusunoki and he signed off on the production as soon as he saw the quality of the footage.
In the film Nakamura plays Akio Asakura, a 3rd-year high school student who falls in love with a souped-up Fairlady S30Z. Asakura admitted he doesn’t even have his driver’s license and had no idea how to operate a manual transmission so he had to do a lot of studying about cars. It wasn’t really much of an issue though because most of the filming was with the car in tow.
Since the manga has so many fans, Muroga said his priority was to make an adaptation that remained loyal to the spirit of the original. Japanese audiences will get to judge whether he was successful or not when “Wangan Midnight: The Movie” is released this summer.
Sources: Variety Japan, ANN
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