After DreamWorks brought on Ruper Sanders to direct and advance a live action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell that has been kicking around in Hollywood for several years, things are once again taking a potential step forward. The latest bit of news is that Margot Robbie, recently seen in The Wolf of Wall Street, is in taks to take on the lead role for the film, which would be that of Makoto Kusaganagi in the original. The film has a script by Bill Wheeler and has familiar names in the producers seat with Avi Arad, Steven Paul and Mark Sourian. There’s been no word as to how the adaptation would unfold, though obviously it’s expected to be localized and Robbie’s casting would further cement that.
Sander’s has only one film under his best at this time with Snow White and the Huntsman, but he has several short films prior to that and is attached to The Juliet at the moment and is connected to the Van Helsing film, but not committed to it.
Original concept: In a world caught in the grip of information overload, where artificial intelligence is more than the real thing and cyborg cops spend their lives surfing on an electronic sea of living data, only the Ghost – the indefinable element of human consciousness – exists to determine who is alive and who is purely a creation of the net.
Major Motoko Kusanagi is an elite officer in the Section 9 security force: a cybernetic agent so heavily modified that little more than her Ghost remains. Along with fellow cyborg Bateau and the mostly human Togusa, Kusanagi is set on the trail of a computer-criminal known as the Puppet Master, a data thief skilled enough to hack into the very minds of his victims. His human marionettes live out existences that are nothing more than computer generated fantasy, unwittingly committing their master’s crimes while the Ghost-hacker hides in the darkness.
But as Kusanagi digs deeper into the walls of secrecy surrounding the case, it appears that the Puppet Master has a special interest in her alone. And when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shadowy Section 6, enter the scene, Kusanagi becomes tangled in a web of plot and counterplot, and realizes that the true identity of her invisible assailant lies at the center of a vast and lethal political conspiracy…
[Source: Deadline]
