Netflix Reveals November Premiere Date for Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop. There, now that I have your attention… let’s jam!

In an announcement that hit Twitter in the wee hours of the morning on Monday, August 23rd, Netflix just shot an arrow straight into the hearts of so many sci-fi fans by revealing still images and a premiere date for their upcoming live-action adaptation of the classic anime, Cowboy Bebop.

Starting with the news that many (most of?) you have been waiting for, Netflix will premiere the series on Friday, November 19th, and it will consist of ten one-hour-long episodes. Half of them are directed by Alex Garcia Lopez, with Michael Katleman directing the other five. Every episode is being written by the collective studio Sunrise penname Hajime Yatate, which means they have direct involvement with how this property is going to be handled. They have also confirmed that the original director, Shinichiro Watanabe, has been involved as a creative consultant. Also returning from the original anime is Yoko Kanno, who will compose the series’s background music.

To recap what we know so far, this is an adaptation that has been in the works since 2017 — unless you want to get into the original movie adaptation that was supposed to star Keanu Reeves as Spike, but that’s a whole other article for a whole other day — when Netflix revealed they were going to be hosting the series being developed by Tomorrow Studios.

After over a year of silence, we finally learned a few cast members, including John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, Elena Satine, and Alex Hassell, who would all be playing leading roles. Supporting roles were filled out one by one after that. At this point it looked like smooth sailing and that we were all going to get to see the live-action adaptation before much longer… and then Cho got injured and the world got set on fire, which set production back a few months until this year when Netflix confirmed the series would come, soon.

To be totally honest, I never loved the original Cowboy Bebop. It’s a very good series, but since I didn’t watch it when it was originally released, I don’t have the same level of nostalgia for the series that so many others do. That certainly isn’t stopping me from being highly intrigued and excited to see what happens with this adaptation, though.

While there have been a couple of successful movie adaptations of anime and manga within the last 20 years (let’s please not argue again about which ones I’m referring to), this could be the best attempt at turning an anime property into a live-action series that we see. I don’t think that it’s hyperbolic to say that this series could make or break Hollywood live-action series adaptations for the foreseeable future (despite many fans wanting Hollywood to leave anime and manga alone). It will all depend on how well the moving parts of this production come together and, for my money, it finally feels like all the right parts are finally being used in the proper way.