Last month, Deadline revealed that Netflix has assembled the main cast for their live-action Cowboy Bebop series based on the fan-favorite anime series. That cast includes John Cho (Star Trek 1-3, Searching) as Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage) as Jet Black, Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) as Faye Valentine, and Alex Hassell as Vicious.

Cowboy Bebop is the jazz-inspired, genre-bending story of a ragtag crew of bounty hunters on the run from their pasts as they hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals. They’ll even save the world — for the right price.

HN Entertainment previously revealed that there were multiple filming locations Netflix was scouting for the upcoming science fiction series, one of them happened to include New Zealand. We are now hearing that New Zealand is indeed expected to be one of the locations they’ll end up using for the series.

A couple of things New Zealand provides a production like Cowboy Bebop could use, multiple fantastic scenic exterior shots along with some fantastic production crews as it was recently used for manga/anime film Ghost In The Shell with some help from Weta Workshop (worked on Netflix’s Altered Carbon). While I was let down by the quality of Ghost In The Shell as a film, it remains to be one of the best-looking films of that year due to the production design and New Zealand as a filming location.

With Altered Carbon wrapping up their shoot next month in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, there is a good shot that a second locale could be Vancouver. However, nothing solid is really pointing towards Vancouver at this time, but they were considering shooting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada at one time.

There is a good chance they’ll be adding Marco Polo and Crazy Rich Asians supervising art director Gary Mackay.

Also on the production team, DiscussingFilm mentioned that cinematographer Jean-Philippe Gossart, who recently worked on Netflix’s Witcher series starring Henry Cavill is joining Cowboy Bebop.

Cinematographer Jean-Philippe Gossart (‘The Witcher’, ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’) has joined the crew for John Cho’s live-action ‘COWBOY BEBOP’ series. (EXCLUSIVE) pic.twitter.com/bf5Ca19FX1 — DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) April 27, 2019

ProductionWeekly had suggested a July 10th production start.

A release date has yet to be announced but Cowboy Bebop should drop sometime in 2020.

SOURCE: HN ENTERTAINMENT