Your Name Remake

J.J. Abrams (Star Trek / Super 8 / Star Wars: The Force Awakens / the good seasons of Lost), Paramount Pictures, and Toho are remaking Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name (Kimi no Na wa).

Abrams is set to produce the project and screenwriter Eric Heisserer will write the script. Heisserer was nominated for an Oscar for Arrival, which has a similar sci-fi, romance infused story to Your Name. The movies came out the same year without influencing each other.

This is huge news since J.J. Abrams is currently viewed as a paragon in modern Hollywood and has experience working within the science-fiction genre. Your Name‘s themes of hope, self-discovery, and love are also universal elements that can be easily adapted into live-action.

Your Name Hollywood Remake

Shinkai has given Abrams his blessing to produce the remake, commenting “When such a work is imbued with Hollywood filmmaking, we may see new possibilities that we had been completely unaware of. I am looking forward to the live-action film with excited anticipation.”

Genki Kawamura, a producer of Your Name, said “The meetings so far have been creatively stimulating with fantastic ideas that no doubt will make for a great movie. I am greatly honored to work with these incredible creators in bringing to audiences the Hollywood live-action version of Your Name.”

Your Name became a phenomenon and is currently the highest-grossing anime movie of all-time. The story centers around two teens living in different regions in Japan. Mitsuha has always yearned to live in Tokyo and leave the countryside. Taki, a student living in Tokyo, struggles to juggle his life as a student and part-time worker. These two lives become intertwined as a mysterious phenomenon allows them to switch bodies without having met before.

More details on the remake will be revealed at a later time.