Once Upon A Time, Keanu Reeves Almost Played Spike In A Live-Action Cowboy Bebop Movie

The big movie studios opted out of San Diego Comic-Con 2023, meaning the event didn't have all the air sucked up by the next big Marvel Cinematic Universe news for once. One of the most exciting announcements was "Lazarus," a new sci-fi thriller anime from Shinichirō Watanabe (director of "Cowboy Bebop," "Samurai Champloo," and more) and Studio MAPPA.

The announcement came with a teaser trailer; Watanabe's animes always have a musical theme and it looks like "Lazarus" will have the same jazzy score as "Bebop" (this time performed by saxophonist Kamasi Washington). Rather than a U.S. import like most anime, "Lazarus" will premiere on Toonami (the production team is aiming to be finished by the end of 2024). The American influence doesn't stop there, for the action scenes will be designed by "John Wick" director Chad Stahelski. Watanabe crafts animated action with unrivaled fluidity, so him and Stahelski working together is a dream team.

Even before this project, Watanabe and Stahelski were already linked by six degrees of Keanu Reeves. There was a time when Reeves was set to play Spike Spiegel in a live-action film adapting "Cowboy Bebop."

"Cowboy Bebop" premiered in Japan during 1998 then came to the U.S. in 2001 on Adult Swim. A massive stateside hit thanks to its intrinsic qualities and a perfect English dub, it helped shepherd anime into the U.S. mainstream. The series ran only 26 episodes, but its popularity earned it a movie, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door," in 2001. That movie, directed again by Watanabe, proved the series could sustain a two-hour feature, and Hollywood noticed.

In 2008, iF Magazine reported that producer Erwin Stoff was developing a live-action "Cowboy Bebop" film for 20th Century Fox. Watanabe, original script supervisor Keiko Nobumoto, and Sunrise Studios president Kenji Uchida would be producers as well. "I have such an enormous admiration for its creators, that our first and foremost concern is going to be a real degree of faithfulness to the tone of the movie, to the mix of genres, and so on and so forth," Stoff told the magazine.

Stoff had previously produced "A Scanner Darkly" starring Keanu Reeves. That meant it wasn't a surprise the following year when Reeves was cast as Spike. From there, though, the project stalled out. There was never a confirmed director or announcements about who would play the other characters, such as Spike's bounty-hunting partners Jet and Faye or his enemy Vicious. Maybe they could've gone for a full "Matrix" reunion with Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Hugo Weaving, respectively.

In 2013, Reeves confirmed in a Reddit AMA that the "Cowboy Bebop" film had fallen through:

"'Cowboy Bebop' does not look like it is going to happen with me in it. The script that was written was great and amazing, but it would cost like half a billion dollars to make it, and while I wished and hoped I would have done that project, we are working on trying to get 'Bill & Ted 3.' There's a script and we are trying to put it together."

"Bill & Ted Face The Music" was ultimately released in 2020. As for that "great and amazing" script for "Cowboy Bebop," a draft of it has circulated online. Dated April 25, 2009, it was written by Peter Craig (who's since scripted "The Town," "The Batman" and "Top Gun: Maverick"). It loosely adapts the first episode, "Asteroid Blues," where Spike and Jet go to the asteroid colony Tijuana to capture bounty Asimov Solensan, and the last, "The Real Folk Blues," where Vicious tries to seize control of the Red Dragon Syndicate before he and Spike have their last confrontation. References to other episodes are sprinkled in.

The script opens with Asimov breaking Vicious out of prison and from there, the latter places a 400 million Woolong bounty on Spike's head. This flips the formula of the series and "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" on its head — this time, the Bebop crew would be the ones hunted.

Watanabe also commented on the failure of Reeves' "Cowboy Bebop" to take off at London's MCM Comic Con in 2014; it seems he'd been locked out of production's loop. "I'm afraid I don't know what they're thinking in Hollywood. Apparently, the project hasn't come to a stop but I don't know how it's going to progress from here on. I hear that there are a lot of 'Hollywood' problems."

The live-action "Cowboy Bebop" we got in 2021 (as a TV series on Netflix) was a dud — Watanabe himself was not a fan of it. Would Reeves' version have been better? It's hard to say without knowing who else would've been cast. However, Craig's script doesn't have the screwball humor that sank Netflix's "Bebop." With a Hollywood blockbuster budget, it probably wouldn't have looked as kitschy as the Netflix version either.

Reeves looks the part of Spike Spiegel; black hair, thin face, and lean muscle. He's also mixed-race, which acknowledges Spike's ethnically-ambiguous features (fans have interpreted him both as Asian or as Ashkenazi Jewish). The one thing that gives me pause is the character's mood. Spike often had a twinkle in his eye and a cocky smirk. In his action roles like Neo or John Wick, Reeves is more dour. If Reeves infused a pinch of Ted "Theodore" Logan energy (at least the grin) into his performance Spike, I think he'd nail it.

While "John Wick" has reaffirmed Reeves as one of Hollywood's premier action stars, he's probably aged out of the part as Spike at this point. He's seven years older than John Cho, the Spike of Netflix "Bebop," who many thought was already too old in 2021.

Oh well. If there's one lesson to "Cowboy Bebop," it's that living in the past will get you killed. Best not to dwell on what might have been.