Splendent to Handle Rights to 69 Akira Kurosawa Titles1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Los Angeles-based film and television production company Splendent Media signed a multi-year deal to represent the rights outside Japan to 69 titles from legendary director Akira Kurosawa.
Among the works Splendent is handling are many of his live-action classics and The Masque of the Black Death, an unproduced script that Kurosawa co-wrote before his death in 1998. The Masque of the Black Death was slated to receive a theatrical animated film adaptation in 2010 (see picture below).
The Masque of the Black Death was to be one of two theatrical projects that would celebrate the 100th anniversary of Kurosawa’s birth in 2010, along with a Hollywood remake of Rashomon. Japan’s Kurosawa Production and Lotus, America’s Lexicon Film Entertainment and Harbor Light Entertainment, and Singapore’s Upside Down Entertainment were to jointly produce The Masque of the Black Death.
Kurosawa and his writing collaborator Masato Ide (Red Beard, Kagemusha, Ran) based their unproduced script on “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 horror short story about a prince’s attempt to escape a plague while holding a masquerade in his abbey.
Kurosawa and Ide’s version moves the setting to a fictional version of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, when most of humanity faces a deadly contagion. The suspense story deals with the human condition when people are pushed to extremes and despair
