A few months ago it looked like Carl Eric Rinsch, a commercials director who’d been schooled through Tony and Ridley Scott’s RSA advertising company, was going to get his big Hollywood break directing a prequel to Alien. However then Ridley himself jumped onboard the project and Rinsch was left out in the cold.
Luckily for Carl, it now looks like he’s found a new movie with which to make his feature directing debut – 47 Ronin. Variety reports that Rinsch is in talks to helm the Universal movie, which is due to star Keanu Reeves. The film will tell the true-life tale of a band of 18th Century samurai swordsmen, who avenge the death of their master. While it’s a fact based story, Variety suggests that the film “mixes the fantastical elements of films like The Lord of the Rings with battle scenes of the sort found in Gladiator and 300.” That may be just Hollywood hyperbole, but it certainly make the movie sound like an odd mixture of historical epic and fantasy film.
The script, by Chris Morgan (Wanted) has been specifically tailored to squeeze the non-Japanese Keanu Reeves into the script as one of the swordsmen, although it sounds like the film will make use of his part-Asian heritage. While it all sounds a bit like The Last Samurai to us, it could still be pretty good, and certainly shows Hollywood’s realisation that Asia is now their biggest growing market.