Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese science fiction series that was initially released in the late 1990s. The show followed the lives of a group of bounty hunters travelling the earth in a vessel called Bebop. It was set in the year 2071, and it explored a variety of themes, including loneliness, poverty, and the difficulties of running away from one’s past.
The series was a massive success for anime. It is recognized as one of the shows that popularized anime in the United States and internationally. Cowboy Bebop is slated for a return to our screens soon. This piece will detail everything about the show’s impending release.
When will Cowboy Bebop come to Netflix?
Cowboy Bebop is set to come to Netflix in 2021. The series might have appeared earlier, but actor John Cho (Spike Spiegel) suffered an injury to the knee that required surgery and a 7-9 months recovery period. Instead of re-casting the role, the producers chose to wait on Cho to recover.
The COVID-19 outbreak led to a complete halt of production, and it pushed a potential release date further forward. However, we expect that the series will be available in 2021.
What you expect to see in the live-action Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop will come to you in ten hour-long episodes instead of the 26 featured in the original anime show. The main characters will remain as they were in the original show, and they will continue roaming around in their spacecraft, trying to eke out a living. According to the showrunner, Javier Grillo-Marxauch, the story will remain the same, but the new show will tell it differently. He stated in an interview with io9:
“We’re not going to go one-to-one of those stories because we’re also trying to tell the broader story of Spike Spiegel… But we are looking at the show and saying, ‘Who are some of the greatest villains in this show, and how can we put them into this broader narrative?’ So that we are telling both of the big stories that Cowboy Bebop tells.”
He revealed that the show will have its most memorable villains, but he didn’t go into details about them. We can also expect the main characters to have more profound and more significant storylines. According to Javier, the production team’s primary motivation is for the live-action show to live up to the original. He said:
“We don’t want the fans of the show to look at it and say we failed them or we failed the original.”
The shows production team is reportedly so excited that they have already started writing season 2.