Shōgun Adaptation Finally Gaining Momentum At FX

Pull out your thousand-page paperbacks, because James Clavell’s epic novel of feudal Japan, Shōgun, is headed to the small screen once again. The famous novel, first published in 1975 was quickly adapted into a miniseries back in 1980, with the great Richard Chamberlain, Toshiro Mifune, and John Rhys-Davies all starring. It’s a stale that’s held up well in both mediums.

Back in 2018, FX announced that it would be developing yet another small screen take on the story, but around a year ago, they put it on hold. It was only after The Jungle Book writer Justin Marks came back on board that it started to gain momentum, with Marks writing alongside wife Rachel Kondo, who is of Japanese descent.

Now, Deadline is reporting that the series is headed into production.

RELATED – Shōgun Miniseries On The Way Based On Epic James Clavell Novel

“It’s a big re-adaptation in a sense that we had many scripts and were in pre-production, and we ended up for various reasons deciding that we didn’t believe in the production plan and we didn’t think the scripts in their current form were as good as they could be,” FX Networks Chairman John Landgraf told Deadline during TCA earlier this month. “The writer (Ronan Bennett) was no longer available to keep working on those scripts, so we took it down to the studs, we started from scratch. Now are well into development, and are really excited about the scripts that are coming out of that. We have read multiple scripts, multiple rewrites of scripts, multiple outlines.”

The big challenge is making an adaptation that isn’t incredibly westernized, and to combat this, they have hired cultural consultants to assist.

“A very part of what is challenging about it from a production standpoint is, you could do a very westernized version of  Shōgun in the past, and now you have to make it really authentic,” Landgraf said. “And it’s really challenging shooting in Japan because it’s a very different production culture than American culture, and this is a big, big production. It’s not just getting great scripts, which we do but coming up with a production plan is really challenging.”

From the sound of it, they hope to set the series into production soon, but because you can’t shoot in Japan during the summer Olympics — which is from July 24 through August 9, that’s one big chunk of time they have to work around.

Either way, this seems like an admirable and ambitious project that I can’t wait to see underway, and I may have to revisit that novel, which I haven’t read for well over a decade.

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SOURCE: Deadline

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