Movie buffs love to talk about “the greatest movies never made,” many of them being science fiction, fantasy, or horror projects. Anime fans, too, speculate about projects that were never produced—but one of the most notorious of all such possible projects wasn’t an anime per se. Rather, it was a prospective live-action adaptation of one of anime’s most controversial and seminal works: Neon Genesis Evangelion.



2003: The first stirrings of rumor

In 2003, Weta Workshop Ltd. was best known as the New Zealand-based special effects company that helped Peter Jackson realize the three Lord of the Rings films. They were known to anime fans, but only in the sense that many anime fans were also Lord of the Rings or Peter Jackson fans.

In the wake of the release of the final Lord of the Rings film, though, rumors began to circulate that Weta was involved in an anime fan’s dream project: a live-action Evangelion. While a few live-action productions had been made from anime properties—e.g., Crying Freeman (1995) comes to mind—nothing had been made that remotely approached the scope or the budget of the Rings films. To have an anime-inspired project of such a level of prestige was a thrilling idea … but at that point it was an idea, and nothing more.

Rumor became fact when Weta made a joint announcement at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival, along with Gainax, creators of Evangelion, and ADV Films, Evangelion’s North American distributor.

The announcement claimed that all three parties were indeed collaborating on such a project. But what was most conspicuous was the lack of hard details: no projected budget, no director, no cast, no screenwriter, and no timeframe for production or release.

Not that any of that deterred anyone’s enthusiasm.



2005: “Profitmón!”

For the next few years, ADV’s John Ledford and Matt Greenfield set about doing the needed pavement-pounding to raise awareness, interest, and most importantly money for Evangelion: The Motion Picture.

Actually, make that Pictures, plural. As Lord of the Rings showed, one Evangelion movie might not be enough, and so in time the plan was widened to possibly include three feature-length films as well.

But whether it was three movies or one, the biggest missing ingredient was money. And as a CNN.com article entitled “It's... Profitmón!” noted, some $100 to $120 million would need to be raised to get the film made. The 2005 article noted that at the time, “about half” of the money had been scared up, thanks also to the aid of Weta co-founder Richard Taylor.

Money or not, fan interest in the film remained white-hot, as the CNN.com article indicated: “Before [Taylor and a prospective investor] could sit down [to lunch], a fan recognized Taylor and asked him not about anything he's actually done, but about Evangelion. Taylor turned to the producer and said, ‘This is why we have to do this movie.’” Taylor also claimed that at the time, they were getting something like twenty-five emailsabout Evangelion for every one they received about Lord of the Rings.

Their belief, and it wasn’t a disputable one at the time, was that the strength of the fanbase would make the project viable.

2006: Tekkoshocon and the rumor mill

Pittsburgh has been host to Tekkoshocon, an annual anime convention, since 2003. In April of 2006, the convention allowed representatives from ADV Films—Greenfield and English-language Evangelion voice actress Tiffany Grant—to hold court with fans about the Evangelion live-action project.

As described at the EvaGeeks wiki, several surprising details emerged during that panel. First was how the project came together: apparently it was Weta, home to more than a few anime fans, who had first approached ADV and posed the idea of a live-action film. ADV, in turn, approached Gainax, who were excited about the idea and lent their support.

Likewise, ADV had been approached by three unnamed “A-list” directors who were also Evangelion fans as possible helmsmen for the project. Another remarkable tidbit was how Robin Williams, himself a fan of the show, lent his support to ADV’s “pitch package”—a bundle, including some video, sent to prospective investors to drum up interest.

But a number of other rumors were also swiftly debunked. No, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson had not been approached to play characters, not least of all because they were way too old. No, they didn’t even have a cast in mind, because they needed a director first. And finally, no, the project had not yet even been formally greenlit.



2006: A glimpse at a possible future

Not long after the 2006 panel, Weta Workshop updated its website with some of the first hard visual evidence of the live-action Evangelion being more than just a twinkle in Greenfield, Ledford, and Taylor’s eyes: concept art for the project.

As archived at io9.com, the dozen or so images shown reproduced with great fidelity many key images and visual concepts from the show. The half-devastated future setting; the alien “Angels”; the “plugsuits” worn by many characters—it was all there. If nothing else, Weta seemed determined to preserve everything about Evangelion that made it what it was, at least as far as the visuals went.

Tantalizing as it all was, fans were irked by another wrinkle: how that the names of characters in the concept sketches had been Anglicized—e.g., Asuka Langley Soryu became “Kate Rose.” This was eventually fixed, but many fans were sore over the idea of the majority of the cast being whitewashed or “racebent” away from being Asian.

Was this a sign the producers of the film were getting cold feet about the prospect of selling the project to Western audiences who didn’t know what Evangelion (let alone anime) was? Perhaps not—the ADV/Weta nexus was pretty insistent on keeping the casting faithful—but it hinted at how tough the audience might be to please, and how thorny the issues involved.

They turned out to be far thornier than most anyone imagined.