Can We Not Ruin Steins;Gate by Taking the Anime to Hollywood?

• Past Hollywood adaptations of Japanese anime have not been positively received.
• One of the highest-rated anime in the world, Steins;Gate, is being adapted into a live-action series.
• This is such a blindly terrible idea that it will hopefully stop others from continuing to do it.

Anime and Hollywood just don’t mix. It’s a fact. Anyone who has ever seen Dragonball Evolution can tell you that. Hell, most people who haven’t seen it can tell you that.

It’s not even like the film is a product of its era. When they tried to do the same thing to Deathnote in 2017, it was also a steaming pile of manure.

Now it seems like one of the best anime out there, Steins;Gate, is next up on the chopping block . Can we please just not do it this time?

Steins;Gate is Going to Get Butchered

There has never been a well-made Hollywood anime adaptation. It just doesn’t exist. They’ve tried stuff like Ghost in the Shell, and they’ve tried Dragonball. There is just a fundamental cultural shift between Japan and American that makes them turn out terribly.

Steins;Gate – and pretty much all anime – is a product of the culture that made it. When Hollywood gets their hands on these sorts of properties, they just seem to try and do the same cliched things with them.

The entire reason that people watch media from other countries is to get a different perspective. At the very least, they do it to see things done in a different way. The problem with these adaptations is that they don’t seem to get that.

This Is a One-Way Street

While American versions of Japanese shows have all been awful, that is not true the other way around. Series like Batman Ninja and movies like Highlander: The Search For Vengeance have shown that anime adaptations of Western IPs can work. So why not the other way around?

Well, if you look at the really successful anime adaptations in Japan, you’ll notice something. Not one of them is telling the main story of that IP. In every case, they are taking the elements that made those properties great and giving them their own spin.

That’s not what happens when an anime is adapted into a Hollywood production. Typically Hollywood tries to tell the same story but makes it more American. That’s what happened with Death Note, and that is what is going to happen with Steins;Gate.

Let’s just hope that when Steins;Gate fails, it stops the Hollywood ripoff machine from working for a while.

About the Author

William Worrall

William Worrall is a professional writer based out of the UK who has been writing about video and tabletop games for over a decade and has covered industry events such as EGX and UKGE. Contact him at [email protected], see his LinkedIn profile here.

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