Warner Bros. Wants Brad Pitt for “All You Need is Kill”

About a year ago, Doug Liman was attached to direct an adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s manga All You Need Is Kill. It looks as though the project may be starting to move toward production as Vulture reports that Warner Bros. wants Pitt to star in the movie.

The premise for the movie is quite interesting, something akin to Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. The protagonist of the story is a young Army soldier who is killed in the first day of an intergalactic alien invasion of Earth. However, he continually comes back to life to the day before he is killed to fight the battle over and over again. While this may sound repetitive, the hero soon understands his predicament and starts evolving from a below average fighter to a vaunted warrior.

First thing first, everybody wants Brad Pitt in their movies, there is no guarantee that he will take on the role. Warner Bros. is obviously aware that this is going to be a very expensive movie to make (acquiring the rights for the movie cost them seven figures already) and they would like to have one of the biggest Hollywood star to open it. The main issue is that Pitt isn’t quite right to play the main character. Simply put, he is way too old to play a “young Army recruit”.

In any case, Pitt is in no hurry to make a decision. He is currently shooting World War Z and recently became attached to James Gray’s thriller The Grey Man. He can currently be seen in Moneyball, out in theaters this weekend, for which he is reaping some Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.

Finally, Vulture also mentions that Liman’s concurrent project Luna is now dead in the water as David Ellison’s Skydance Productions decided to back down from co-financing the budget which is rumored to be north of $100 million.

Here is the synopsis for the manga:

There’s one thing worse than dying. It’s coming back to do it again and again… When the alien Gitai invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many raw recruits shoved into a suit of battle armor and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to find himself reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On the 158th iteration though, he sees something different, something out of place: the female soldier known as the Bitch of War. Is the Bitch the key to Keiji’s escape, or to his final death?