As the Cannes Film Festival is but one week away from kicking off in the South of France, posters and other such studio marketing ads will no doubt begin to be plastered across the Crosiette this week, if it hasn't begun already. One such ad that is due to be erected is the following sales poster for Cobra: The Space Pirate, director Alexandre Aja's (Piranha 3D, Haute Tension) attempt to adapt the Japanese manga turned popular animated t.v. series into a live-action feature film. The french director bought the rights to the source material from creator Buichi Terasawa last summer and is now in need of a studio to back his vision. See the poster in full below and predict whether it might do the trick of enticing a financial backer; I've never heard of the show personally (Manga isn't my thing), so I'm relying on Worst Previews for the plot;
The new film revolves around Cobra, a notorious rogue pirate whose refusal to align with the United Galaxies Federation put him on the business end of a huge bounty. As he tries to keep his identity secret and avoid capture, Cobra teams up with a sexy bounty hunter named Jane, who is out to locate her sisters and decode a treasure map tattooed on their backs. Their goal: to liberate a lost treasure on Mars.
Sounds and looks very 80's and hella cheesy, but as long as it plays up to this fact knowingly, then I'm in. Aja's films usually do realise they are B-movie, tongue-in-cheek dumb (Piranha 3D, Mirrors, The Hills Have Eyes remake) and the lead character is described as a cool Han Solo/Buck Rogers type with Snake Plissken cigar chomping masculinity... man I'm hooked already. Aja is writing the screenplay with his usual partner Gregory Levasseur and clearly they are hoping a studio will see the potential for a Summer 2013 tentpole. Image from French publication Premiere.fr via AICN.