The story behind one of Satoshi Kon’s recognizable films is making its way to the big screen in Hollywood.
The Paprika live-action adaptation has been given the green light by Amazon Studios and Cathy Yan, the director behind the DC film Birds of Prey, will be both directing and acting as executive producer on the adaptation.
Yan rose to fame in 2020 as the director of the Harley Quinn-centered film. It is a spinoff and sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad and this also made her the first female Asian director to direct a superhero movie. She was also the director of Dead Pigs in 2018.
Paprika was first written in 1993 as a novel by Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui. The novel became more famous worldwide after director Satoshi Kon turned it into an anime feature released in 2006. The techno-thriller was Kon’s final movie before his untimely death in 2010.
As for the story itself, it tells the story of a psychotherapist named Atsuko Chiba who is an expert in the use of “psychotherapy devices” that traps a patient’s dreams and displays them on a monitor. Atsuko is able to manipulate these dreams and even enter them as an aid to psychoanalysis. When treating patients, she transforms herself into the guise of Paprika, an alter ego she created, to mask her true identity and uses this to reveal a terrorist’s identity.
Yan’s producing partner Ash Sarohia will be on board as an executive producer under their Rewild banner, as well as Masi Oka, Hivemind’s Jason F. Brown.
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