by Owl

New Line Cinema acquired the feature film rights to the manga in 2005, and even assigned a writer, Josh Olson (Batman: Gotham Knight), to pen two possible films. However, Deadline reported that the project grew too big for a feature or two. Del Toro then convinced Urasawa to allow him to tackle the project. Del Toro, Murphy, and Montford previously attempted to turn the H.P. Lovecraft novella At The Mountains Of Madness into a feature film with Tom Cruise, but the project stalled over whether it will have an R rating.

I'm still angry about that. If anyone could have done Lovecraft right, it would have been Del Toro, and then it had to get stalled because of a rating! Grah!

In any case, Monster is a fantastic manga/anime and I'm glad to see directors venture to make movie adaptations of anime, since there's a lot of good anime out there.