Like it or not, a live-action Naruto movie seems to be coming from Hollywood after spending many years in development hell. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings director Destin Daniel Cretton is currently attached to the project, and while he might have the directing sauce needed to pull off a flashy manga/anime adaptation, we’re understandably worried about such a tricky transition regardless. Now, the movie’s original writer is trying to calm fans down.
Entertainment Weekly recently talked to scribe Tasha Huo, the showrunner for Netflix’s upcoming Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft animated series, and of course, tried to extract new information regarding Naruto. To their surprise (and everyone else’s), she actually spoke at length about the process of putting that movie together so far.
While Cretton is now part of Hollywood’s ‘big leagues’ thanks to Shang-Chi’s reasonable success in 2021 – just as we were starting to exit the worst of the Covid pandemic – his background doing original work is extensive, and he’s also found time to continue to produce shorts and TV series after his Marvel movie found an audience. Huo praised that aspect of his career, saying “his own writing and storytelling” is “very personal and relatable” to viewers before teasing the main idea behind the Naruto movie is to focus on the characters and what they go through: “This is definitely a movie that comes at it from a love of who Naruto is and that character and his relationships.”
