“I haven’t heard anything back”: the abandoned Keanu Reeves movie that became an awful Netflix series instead
With the benefit of hindsight, some projects would have been much better off staying in development hell where they belonged, with one abandoned Keanu Reeves movie proving that point when it finally made it to the screen as a widely derided Netflix original.
Despite having over four decades of Hollywood stardom under his belt and evolving into one of the industry’s most beloved figures, Reeves still isn’t and hasn’t ever really been the kind of actor who can will a picture into existence based on his name alone. Not that there’s any shame in that, because there are very few names in the business who wield that kind of clout.
No matter how much he wanted it to happen, which was a lot, from the sound of things, the Point Break and Speed frontman couldn’t even get the film close to the starting blocks. In the end, it slipped away from him entirely, only to be resurrected more than a decade later, where it was almost instantly placed on the chopping block.
To put it lightly, Americanised adaptations of Japanese anime and/or manga have been incredibly sketchy. Alita: Battle Angel was alright, Dragonball: Evolution was an embarrassing piece of shit, Ghost in the Shell was caught up in a whitewashing controversy, and Speed Racer flopped before slowly nudging itself toward cult classic status.
In late 2008, Reeves signalled his intentions to play Spike Spiegel in a live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, which was eying a tentative 2010 release date. “I haven’t heard anything back,” he offered a couple of years later. “They turned in a script, and it was very expensive.” Several drafts later, and nothing had changed.
Eventually, after sharing that “there’s still knocking on that door, but it hasn’t opened,” Reeves gave up the ghost, consigning Cowboy Bebop to his what-if pile. In November 2021, the adaptation finally made it to the screen, with John Cho as Spiegel in a Netflix series that was almost immediately cancelled because nobody, including creator Shinichirō Watanabe, seemed to like it very much at all.
Fans were desperately unhappy that the show had deviated so far from the source material, and subscribers who didn’t have a fucking clue what it was weren’t sold on it, either. In one of the least ringing endorsements possible, Watanabe revealed that he only watched the opening scene, and after realising that “it was clearly not Cowboy Bebop,” he gave up then and there.
To add insult to injury, Netflix wasted absolutely no time in putting the failed series out of its misery. On December 9th, 2021, a mere 20 days after it had premiered, Cowboy Bebop was no more. An utterly pointless exercise, then, with those years lodged in the darkest recesses of development hell arguably a much better fate than escaping, all things considered.
For all we know, a Reeves-led Cowboy Bebop movie could have been shite, too, but we didn’t get to find that out. Instead, Netflix dropped one of its most embarrassingly short-lived originals, waiting less than three weeks to sweep it under the rug completely.
