The live action that have come out of dragonball they are a disaster for a very simple reason: Akira Toriyama does not get involved. He doesn’t like them. In fact, he doesn’t even enjoy the anime film adaptations of the series, which is why most of them are non-canon.
However, he would only have thought of it if a legendary Asian actor accepted the role of Goku. It’s the only way we would have had a live action Dragon Ball with the sensei pulling the strings of production.
It is about the iconic Jackie Chan, according to a review 3D games. The portal echoes an extract from the Dragon Ball encyclopedias, which have a lot of statements by Akira Toriyama about his most representative work.
“When I was still drawing ‘Dr. Slump’, he was in love with Jackie Chan movies, so he would play them in the background while he worked. I mentioned this to my editor in passing, and he told me to try to draw a self-contained story about kung-fu,” Toriyama says of the Chinese actor.
“So I came up with this piece with the dubious title of ‘Dragon Boy’ (basically identical to Goku but with wings instead of a tail). And surprisingly, people loved ‘Dragon Boy’, so I shut down the wacky ‘Dr. Slump’ and got to work on a new martial arts series,” he noted.
For his part, Jackie Chan repeatedly showed his willingness to carry out these shoots that never became a reality.
“It’s a job that I would really love to turn into a movie. Dragon Ball’ is full of so many amazing and imaginative ideas. However, to make it a live-action movie we would need a bunch of amazing special effects and a massive budget,” he said at the time.