WIth Pokemon Live Action a thing, maybe a serious Live Action DB Series could work...

[ABED]

One of the most important things that made Dragon Ball what it is is Toriyama's distinctive visual style. The next is his very distinctive writer's voice. Live action gets rid of the former, and even Toei has a hard time imitating the latter.

[Kunzait_83]

You are aware that there’s already a live action Chinese Dragon Ball movie right? It’s bad.

Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins was made in Taiwan by an independent, ultra-low budget nobody of a studio for next to nothing.

A live action Dragon Ball movie produced at that same point in time (late 80s/early 90s) by a major A-list Hong Kong studio - such as Golden Harvest - would've resulted in a production that, if nothing else at a minimum, would have been on a TOTALLY different level and scale entirely from something like The Magic Begins.

Understand: the Chinese film industry is in NO way some monolithic entity. Its the same as in ANY other country, including the U.S. - different regions with different types of studios will net you completely different kinds of productions. The Magic Begins was the result of the Chinese equivalent of some rinky dink indie studio in Milwaukee run out of someone's garage that traffics mainly in producing straight to video shelf-filler for the "action" section of 80s and 90s video stores: as opposed to a proper Hong Kong studio picture, which would've been the Chinese equivalent to a lavish, big budget Hollywood epic.

And that being said: even rinky dink indie studios in Taiwan have in the past managed to produce VASTLY better and more endearing/entertaining Wuxia films than The Magic Begins. Even ones in a very similar overall vein as DB itself: The Child of Peach series, which I've waxed about at length on here in the past, were all independently produced low budget Taiwanese Wuxia films, and they have a boundless and very Dragon Ball-esque energy and charm to spare.

So even by the vastly lower standards of an ultra low-budget cheaply thrown together independent Taiwanese Wuxia film, The Magic Begins is still a giant clunker that fails on even those particular terms. Even when gauged next to others of its particular ilk, there are literally countless dozens other, waaaay better martial arts fantasy films from that region and from those types of low-rung studios that do an exponentially better job at capturing a very similar tone and spirit as Dragon Ball than does the actual low-budget Taiwanese stab at a live action DB movie: making The Magic Begins all that much more especially incompetent given that context.

By that same token also, understand: I'm not even necessarily arguing here that an early 90s Hong Kong DB film would've been a full-stop 100% guarantee of absolute perfection: NOTHING in life is a 100% iron-clad guarantee of ANY kind (as The Magic Begins itself is clearly a testament to). Just that the specific conditions of the Hong Kong studio system during THAT particular point in time would've been the most ideal and holistic environment for a standout good live action DB film to have been made: potentially even the best possible live action DB film ("potentially" being the operative word there). Certainly a great deal more LIKELY and with MUCH better odds working in its favor than it would have in most other conditions or circumstances.

The Magic Begins is hardly indicative of that specific set of conditions however, because it was NOT a Hong Kong production, and it CERTAINLY wasn't anywhere within the same zipcode of "big budget" or containing a fraction of an ounce of the ridiculous levels of acting and martial arts stunt talent that the big Hong Kong studios had at their disposal back then (again, this was back when Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Chow Yun Fat, Stephen Chow, Michelle Yeoh, and countless others more besides were all simultaneously working together in their absolute physical and career primes and putting out their defining work that made them industry legends).

While a big budget Hong Kong studio live action DB may still have potentially turned out as a flop (though with the right talent of the time thrown at it, that doesn't seem nearly as likely given the utterly IMMENSE once-in-a-lifetime talent pool that the Hong Kong film industry had at that time), one thing it would've UNQUESTIONABLY been was a thousand times better made and at a bare minimum, VASTLY more interesting than what something like The Magic Begins ended up as.

[Yuli Ban]

What Kunzait says. I'm in total agreement. Everyone who repeats the "it can't be done because it's too goofy/wacky" probably grew up watching entirely different kinds of action movies (especially Westernized kung fu movies/action movies that have some punching and kicking and maybe Jet Li or Jackie Chan) and have literally no clue what wuxia and martial arts cinema routinely pull off and then wield this ignorance as if it's just as educated as those who know better.

Live action Dragon Ball CAN be done. Period. Because it's essentially been done before a not-insignificant number of times.
Yes, it will lose Toriyama's visual style and laid-back purely-for-fun storytelling, but to say it can't be done adequately is like someone who's only ever played first person shooters telling a fan of platformers that there will never be a good 3D platform game.
Hollywood would obviously screw it up (it sure is a mighty damn good thing that they never ever made a Dragon Ball movie, especially not in the mid-to-late 2000s, isn't it?) but that doesn't mean everyone will. You'd just need to know where to start, what you're looking to do, and whether or not it looks convincing. That doesn't mean pull a [Name of an entirely theoretical bad Hollywood-made Dragon Ball movie attempt/scientific theory about the origin of modern species] and change everything especially for the sake of changing it (or to make it more palatable for Western audiences).

If you go into it expecting everything to be taken completely seriously like a fairly grimdark early 2010s superhero movie post-Dark Knight or even the newer post-Deadpool self-aware action comedies, you've already made big mistakes because you should have been looking about 3,000 miles west for visual and tonal inspiration. Maybe make a journey there of some sort.

Certain things just wouldn't translate well to live action. Like the spikey hair that Goku and other Saiyans tend to have. I know its supposed to look odd, but good luck making a believable wig.

To be fair!
Saiyan hair isn't that hard to pull off unless you're going for the deliberately super-spiky look. Saiyans are basically supposed to be wild and feral, hence the huge, spiky hair. Cosplayers screw it up by using hair gel, hence that ridiculous look it tends to have because they're trying to make it perfectly accurate to the show's visuals when as everyone else has said that's just not an option in real life.


But you can't blame them because there are only two ways to get "realistic" Saiyan hair:

Electricity


Or actually be a wild man


The electrical look is a bit hard to pull off with hair gel unless you're careful with it, and not many people are willing to sacrifice so many hours of their lives to recreate the conditions to have literal caveman hair (and even if they did, they probably wouldn't be able to have such a Saiyanesque 'fro like this man did).

I used to think that Saiyan hair = spiky. But as I got older and became more cognizant that this is an anime, a medium in a demographic where almost everyone who has hair is going to have spiky hair, "Saiyan hair" shifted towards meaning "wild and untamed" more than it does "spiky." It's still spiky, obviously, but I now think it being wild is more important.



ADD moment: As I mentioned in my Enekai of Kollidor megapost/megaramble linked in my sig, I actually created a completely unfounded headcanon that the reason why Saiyan hair is so wild, spiky, and gravity defying is because of ultra-high levels of bioelectricity. They're so strong and so adept at using ki that the stuff is spewing from their bodies, and it makes their hair look so crazy.

[Kunzait_83]

Everyone who repeats the "it can't be done because it's too goofy/wacky" probably grew up watching entirely different kinds of action movies (especially Westernized kung fu movies/action movies that have some punching and kicking and maybe Jet Li or Jackie Chan) and have literally no clue what wuxia and martial arts cinema routinely pull off and then wield this ignorance as if it's just as educated as those who know better.

Live action Dragon Ball CAN be done. Period. Because it's essentially been done before a not-insignificant number of times.

Yes, it will lose Toriyama's visual style and laid-back purely-for-fun storytelling, but to say it can't be done adequately is like someone who's only ever played first person shooters telling a fan of platformers that there will never be a good 3D platform game.

This right here really is the crux of what this whole conversation essentially boils down to. It's also more or less the same paradigm that lead to the post-FUNimation Western Dragon Ball fanbase going on for more than 20 years without hardly ANYONE so much as knowing of the mere existence of martial arts fantasy/Wuxia as a broader genre of works: Dragon Ball simply took off in America within a VERY different type of audience than that of even the American audience that it was original popular among pre-FUNimation (which were not only older, but also generally a LOT more plugged into a more diverse palette of media than just "Whatever mom let's me watch on TV that day").

The modern Dragon Ball audience post-FUNimation and onward is largely Western kids who grew up almost solely consuming and digesting mainstream U.S. children's cartoons, mainstream Shonen Jump anime, and family-oriented Hollywood blockbuster films... and not a whole lot much else besides those few narrow, specific categories, even up through to this very day as adults.

Stuff like Avatar: The Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Pokemon, the MCU, Power Rangers, Star Wars, Pixar, and various other similar properties are the main touchstones that most people in Western fandom today are working their ENTIRE frame of reference off of, because most fans just aren't particularly curious about or interested in exploring very much of any media that's outside the rigid confines of what their family allowed them to be exposed to as children.

Even though that are literally COUNTLESS thousands upon thousand upon THOUSANDS of thousands of live action films and television shows dating back to literally the silent film era (and a great many of which are anything but obscure: hell, FUNimation themselves - whose releases most modern anime fans tend to obsessively watch like a hawk - even had a brief stint in the late 2000s of licensing out a few classic Wuxia films, and somehow hardly a single person in their broader anime fanbase was any the wiser) that are in many respects almost IDENTICAL in their content, tone, and sensibilities as Dragon Ball, they almost all reside within a broader subset of works that largely exists well far outside the confines of "children's animated television" and "Hollywood Summer Blockbusters": so for all intents and purposes, that entire sweeping history of fiction and media is almost completely gated off from this type of fandom. Dragon Ball just happens to be one of the rare, few examples that managed to slip its way in via the kids' TV realm.

By that same token, hell, if Dragon Ball Z (and other similar anime) never aired on Cartoon Network back in the late 90s, most of the same folks here (often by their very own admission) wouldn't have ever heard of or be fans of either DB itself or anime in general, despite both being more than amply available in plenty of other different venues outside of the kids' TV realm. (Note this of course is obviously mostly just applying to English-speaking fandom: Latino fandom and so on are a WHOLE different ballgame of course). The problem, and its a long-standing and deeply-entrenched one in post-dub fandom, is mainly one of self-imposed sheltering and an unwillingness to look or venture very far beyond the most comfortable and familiar of media.

Granted, a rare few bits of martial arts fantasy/Wuxia media have occasionally managed to slip through into the modern Western DB fandom's periphery here and there (stuff like Kung Fu Hustle and the like will on rare occasions get brought up briefly): but they're seen as rare aberrations and "unique" curiosities, rather than just a few small scraps of a MUCH wider, and broader breadth of works that have ALWAYS been out there and always been popular around the world: they just aren't usually as much of a highlight of realms of media like U.S. kids' TV or the post-superhero boom Hollywood Summer Tentpole landscape.

And those are sadly the main realms of media that Dragon Ball's English-language fanbase stubbornly insists on keeping themselves mainly chained to no matter what, despite the internet as it exists today making it infinitely easier than ever to explore and learn about all sorts of art and creative media from all over the world and all different corners of culture: because "nostalgia", "its what I grew up with", "its what I'm most familiar/comfortable with", "its what's most popular with other people I know", and so on and so forth.

Its just a very small piece of a much broader issue surrounding a totally senseless yet somehow still widespread self-inflicted ignorance and self-sustained sheltering among a particular strain of "geek culture" in the past decade+ that is depressingly unnecessary.

[ABED]

Live action Dragon Ball CAN be done. Period. Because it's essentially been done before a not-insignificant number of times.

Being done and done well are two completely different things.

[Zephyr]

Guy's, it's easy. We just leave Toriyama in charge of casting, costume design, and put him in the director's seat.

[MasenkoHA]

Guy's, it's easy. We just leave Toriyama in charge of casting, costume design, and put him in the director's seat.

Toriyama isn’t a director so no

[Shaddy]

he wasn't being serious.

[WittyUsername]

Serious or not, if Toriyama were to be put in charge of a live action Dragon Ball film, I imagine it would probably end up being something like the Star Wars prequels, or the Fantastic Beasts movies by J.K. Rowling.

[Robo4900]

Well you know, Toei put me in the director's chair, and it just kind of worked. (laughs)

Honestly, I'm glad to be giving up the director's chair for the next film, though. Toyotaro-san is a great director, and I'm sure watching his film will make me very happy.

Can't be worse than that crapfire Evolution tbh.

(laughs)

[sintzu]

Detective Pikachu is now out so if you've seen it, do you still think a DB live action movie can work ? In terms of Box Office, its Domestic opening was 54 million $ and is currently sitting at 170 million $ worldwide. On a 150 million $ budget, not taking into account the marketing cost, do you think a studio will take a risk on something like DB if that's what it will cost and make back ?

Personally, after seeing those numbers and the overall good reception to the movie and its trailers, I don't know if it's worth the risk. The movie had a good budget, was received overall well but for some reason doesn't seem to be making that much money. If this is what something as big as Pokemon can do with a good movie, what chance does DB have ?

[ABED]

I think it'll eventually make money. I can't help thinking coming out so soon after Endgame, which has a lot of repeat business, was a mistake.

[sintzu]

I think it'll eventually make money. I can't help thinking coming out so soon after Endgame, which has a lot of repeat business, was a mistake.

I also believe it would've made more at a different time. I think in order for DB to be profitable, it would need to have a very small budget of around 50 million and just cover the first 2 arcs in the manga. I've always thought it would be best to start with the Saiyan arc, but after seeing the success of other movies due to build up from previous ones, it might be best to start from the beginning of the manga and build up to the Saiyan arc instead.

What do you think ? how would you go about DB live action after seeing what Pokemon is currently doing ?

[Hugo Boss]

After I saw what they did with Captain Marvel, I think someone could pull off something similar with Super Saiyans. The characterization should be done with Toriyama, but some design choices could be toned down. Not a specialist in marketing profit, but as fan I would support the project.

[Gligarman]

Dragon Ball will NEVER work in live-action. Not everything needs live-action treatment. I'd rather see them put those resources into a high quality animated movie.

[louisascommie]

Leonardo DiCaprio as Freeza

[MasenkoHA]

Dragon Ball will NEVER work in live-action.

Bullshit. It will never work as a direct translation and would need to be adapted for film but that literally applies to any kind of cross medium adaptation.

Not everything needs live-action treatment.

True. Wish someone would tell Disney.

I'd rather see them put those resources into a high quality animated movie.

Also true.

[Zarely]

Such a series would be much too expensive to work.

[Kataphrut]

I'm sure they'll eventually try again. DB Evolution was following the Transformers movie principle of Hollywood adaptations ie- we're faintly ashamed of this property but we know it sells, so we'll just attach the name to a bunch of cookie-cutter cliches.

Next time would be the MCU approach- more superficially faithful (while almost certainly trimmed/"cleaned up" to fit the market) with knowing winks to the fandom. The main barrier to entry there is it would have to be a full Asian cast, and for all their courting of the Chinese market, Hollywood still ain't there yet.

[MasenkoHA]

Such a series would be much too expensive to work.

It wouldn’t and I don’t know how you came to that conclusion.