For​tune​.com have just recently pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Animé Explo­sion”.

“From Poké­mon to Full Metal Panic, the animé indus­try is doing every­thing the rest of show biz isn’t: embrac­ing tech­nol­ogy, cod­dling fans—and mak­ing a killing.”

Daniel Roth dis­cusses the cur­rent state of the animé indus­try in the west, the approach to piracy, new tech­nol­ogy and fanat­i­cal otaku. The arti­cle cen­tres on John Led­ford, CEO of AD Vision; pri­mar­ily his busi­ness strate­gies, his encoun­ters with fans at his door at 2am and of course, the live action Evan­ge­lion movie. The arti­cle goes on to men­tion fan-subbers, the enter­tain­ment indus­try and var­i­ous ADV acqui­si­tions. In dis­cussing otaku (extreme animé fanat­ics), Roth gives brief men­tion of the live action evan­ge­lion situation:

“Since 2003 [Ledford’s] been shop­ping the idea of mak­ing a live-action ver­sion of Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion, […] Led­ford signed on the Weta Com­pa­nies, […] to come up with plans for what the Evan­ge­lion world might look like. But instead of micro­manag­ing the project, Led­ford had Weta answer to two Evan­ge­lion fanat­ics at his company.”

Through bad­ger­ing and exten­sive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Weta it shows that ADV are tak­ing this film very seri­ously. This isn’t going to be a cheap knock off; ADV sim­ply can­not afford to offend the great major­ity of their cus­tomers. And to that means it seems they want to do things right, with or with­out Hideaki Anno.

“Richard Tay­lor, Weta’s co-founder, says he’s never expe­ri­enced any­thing quite like it. Twice a week he’d have a con­fer­ence call with the fans at ADV, send­ing them ren­der­ings of his designs for things like the 100-foot-tall robots and get­ting in return their ency­clo­pe­dic take on the inter­pre­ta­tions. “These are peo­ple who could be con­sid­ered schol­ars on the world of Evan­ge­lion,” says Tay­lor. “We had to appease them and find their approval.”

It fol­lows on to men­tion a meet­ing between Tay­lor and a pro­posed pro­ducer at the San Diego Comic-Con in an attempt to ‘jump-start’ the pro­duc­tion. Bud­get­ing is also men­tioned and it seems ADV has raised $100m of the $120 mil­lion they need.

The fans are also mak­ing them­selves heard – a lot. Even more so than those who enjoyed Lord of the Rings:

“We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of let­ters from peo­ple around the world about Lord of the Rings. But we get 25 e-mails about Evan­ge­lion to every one we get about Lord of the Rings,” says Tay­lor. “And Evan­ge­lion has not even been made yet.”

A fan even con­sulted Tay­lor dur­ing his meet­ing with the pro­ducer, ask­ing whether or not any­thing was being done about the movie:

Tay­lor turned to the pro­ducer and said, “This is why we have to do this movie.”

Source: For​tune​.com
Thanks to Derek