Cells at Work to Get Live-Action Movie from Warner Bros.

It looks like the anime industry has locked down its next live-action adaptation! While Netflix focuses on its upcoming One Piece series, the team at Warner Bros. Pictures Japan has announced plans to tackle Cells at Work. The hit manga is heading to the big screen under director Hideki Takeuchi, so get ready for all the Osmosis Jones jokes we know are brewing.

The movie announcement was announced in Japan earlier today by way of Eiga and other trades. According to reports, Cells at Work aims to be one of the biggest film projects undertaken in the Japanese film industry. The adaptation is said to have the industry’s “largest scale” to date, and that makes sense given the story of Cells at Work. The manga is all about the human body, and there are more cells inside a person than we can comprehend.

If you are not familiar with Cells at Work, the series began under creator Akane Shimizu in January 2015. The manga closed six years later, and a spin-off titled Cells at Work: Code Black was also released to great success. Back in 2018, David Production released its anime of Cells at Work, and an animated movie followed two years later in September 2020.

As for its story, the Cells at Work manga is pretty wild. The fantasy series is set within a human body as trillions upon trillions of cells work to keep their body alive. Cells at Work focuses on two such workers, a red blood cell named AE3803 and a white blood cell named U-1146. Shimzu’s manga follows the pair on all sorts of adventures as they do all they can to keep their human alive, and plenty of threats come along to make that job difficult.

You can imagine how difficult it will be to adapt a story like Cells at Work in live-action. We don’t think about it much, but the human body is a gnarly place. There are always a million things going on at once, and our anatomy alone is enough to boggle an average person’s mind. Now, it seems Warner Bros. Pictures Japan is eager to lay out this world in film, so Cells at Work fans can look forward to this ambitious project.

If you want to know more about the manga, Cells at Work is published by Kodansha USA for English readers. You can check out more info on the manga here thanks to its official synopsis: “Strep throat! Hay fever! Influenza! The world is a dangerous place for a red blood cell just trying to get her deliveries finished. Fortunately, she’s not alone… she’s got a whole human body’s worth of cells ready to help out! The mysterious white blood cell, the buff and brash killer T cell, the nerdy neuron, even the cute little platelets — everyone’s got to come together if they want to keep you healthy!”

What do you make of this latest live-action anime pitch? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below or hit me up on Twitter @MeganPetersCB.