The kinetic video game world of “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” made famous in 2010 by Edgar Wright’s dynamic movie starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth-Winstead, and more, is returning for a new generation as an anime series.
The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Universal’s UCP and streaming giant Netflix are joining forces to bring a “Scott Pilgrim” anime series to life. ‘Pilgrim’ graphic novel creator/artist Bryan Lee O’Malley is attached to write and showrun the anime project alongside BenDavid Grabinski, who is behind the recent “Are You Afraid of The Dark?” project for Nickelodeon and 2020’s feature, “Happily.”
Japanese-based studio Science SARU has been tasked to handle the animation and worked on the beloved fantasy series “Adventure Time.” Abel Gongora (“Star Wars: Visions”) is set to direct the series if everything moves forward. Edgar Wright, Nira Park, Marc Platt, Jared LeBoff, Adam Seigel, and screenwriter Michael Bacall, who co-wrote Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” film, will executive produce.
O’Malley’s quirky Toronto-set manga series was the basis for Wright’s action-packed romantic flick about a slacker musician who must battle The League of Evil Exes, her seven ex-boyfriends, in order to win her hand, all the while trying to manage his garage rock band Sex Bob-omb. However, the heightened, fantastical universe is essentially a deadly fighting video game, where defeated opponents are converted into coins, essentially making a vibrant video game metaphor about the perils of romance and dating.
The live-action movie released back in 2010 was an ahead-of-its-time oddity. While it had a substantial budget bump from Wright’s previous films, and a massive cast of now-famous names, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, and more, audiences didn’t seem to appreciate at the time (though it does seem to have finally received a second life in the streaming era). ‘Scott Pilgrim’ also featured a terrific soundtrack —artists like Beck and Broken Social Scene wrote original music for the film—alongside an impressively artistic side-scrolling beat-em-up video game that took visual inspiration directly from the original manga.
O’Malley wrote six ‘Scott Pilgrim’ graphic novels in the early aughts, the elements of which were condensed and sandwiched into Wright’s feature-length movie, so clearly, there are still lots of stories and potentially rich new material to use for the anime series.