Scott Pilgrim Anime Plans Afoot

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright hopes we may see the Sex Bob-Omb bassist back in action sooner rather than later, if plans for a new anime project take off.

In an interview with EW celebrating the film’s 10th anniversary, Wright confirms that he, Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley, and the film’s producer, Jared LeBoff, have been mulling the possibility of making a Scott Pilgrim anime for some time.

“There’s some plans — and there’s nothing official yet — but there are some plans to revisit the material in an animation way. We’ve been talking with Bryan and with Jared for a while [about]: What if we did something with the books in anime form? It’s being discussed as we speak.”

Looking back at the film’s reception upon its release in the summer of 2010, Wright remembers the whiplash between an enthusiastic preview screening at Comic-Con that year and its ultimate failure at the box office a month later. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ended up making just over $48 million globally, nowhere even close to its $85 million budget. Despite being packed with rising stars like Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anna Kendrick, along with a pre-MCU Chris Evans and Brie Larson, the action-comedy just didn’t find its audience at the time.

“It got good reviews, and all the people who were coming to the Q&A’s were really loving it and fervent about it. But that didn’t translate initially.

“It opened the same weekend as The Expendables and Eat Pray Love. I remember getting an email from Marc Platt, one of the film’s producers, on the Friday asking Universal to put more into the spend and predicting doom for the weekend. And I thought — naively — I thought, Well, it’s only Friday morning, how could they know? They know. It opened at number five. It’s that thing where it becomes a bit of a punch line. I’ve never liked Seth MacFarlane, because that weekend he tweeted ‘Scott Pilgrim 0, the World 2.’ I was like, f— you. And then I lay in wait until 8 Million Ways to Die in the West came out, or whatever it was called, and I rubbed my hands with glee. I didn’t tweet anything because I’m not a total monster. [Laughs] But Monday morning Michael Moses sent an email with three words. It was one of the sweetest emails I’ve ever gotten from anybody in the industry. It said, ‘Years, not days.'”

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World‘s fan base grew from word of mouth pretty quickly after it bob-omb-ed, though. In the same anniversary retrospective, O’Malley jokes that “the first article that said it was a cult classic came out maybe three months later.”

“When the DVD came out, we did a press tour, just carried on promoting it like nothing had happened! [Laughs] Scott Pilgrim basically never left release,” Wright added. “The New Beverly [Los Angeles repertory cinema] had it on [at] midnight, and it started playing at other places. With most of the movies we love there’s a tortoise-and-a-hare aspect. The Thing opened at number eight. Big Trouble in Little China didn’t even crack the top 10. I don’t know why I picked two John Carpenter movies, no disrespect to him.”

A Scott Pilgrim anime from this same trio sounds pretty great. Hopefully, with six volumes of O’Malley’s original material to adapt, someone will get their big checkbook out for this new project asap.