Many, many thanks to Laurence for pointing out the freshly arrived second trailer to the upcoming Rebuild of Evangelion, the four film project that will both retell the Evangelion story with freshly updated animation while also adding an entire new chapter to the saga. These series is the absolute king of giant robot anime and arguably one of the top three or four anime productions of all time. They're enormously influential and absolute proof that you can satisfy the child in all of us by having big robots smash things up while also telling a story with significant emotional, philosophical and even spiritual depth. They deserve every bit of acclaim they've received. Still hoping that the WETA-led live action adaptation happens at some point but I'm lusting after these new films as well ...
I don't think any of the Eva characters are reliant on their ethnicity so if it were to ever be adapted that wouldn't be of any real significance. The series made it very clear that the battle against the Angel threat is a global one only centralized in Tokyo-3. In that regard I'd actually prefer the cast be more diverse than was originally presented. And who's to say that they would strip out all of the depth the series have when we know nothing of the project beyond WETA doing the effects. Don't get me wrong, I don't have any interest in seeing EVA adapted by anyone but Anno and his collaborators, but I'm not going to dismiss it at face value without any concrete information on its direction.
Oh, and the new trailer is very nice. I can't wait to see this.
There's a higher quality version available at Stage6
http://stage6.divx.com/user/Malleus1984/video/1514091/Trailer-Rebuild-2
I think it also depends on who the director is in the case of the live action film, although I'm very confident of WETA's effects.
Rebuild starts in a few days here, hope I'll have the time to catch it !
No, it actually mostly depends on the producer(s) and money people backing it. Those are the ones who get the most say in things. Unless you're talking about a hugely influential big name director like Spielberg or Ridley Scott, neither of which is very likely to come on board for a live action anime flick. I know there were even runmors of changing the angels to plain old giant space aliens at some point and that would certainly take care of any and all risky religious content.