It’s official: there will not be a live-action adaption of the famous 1988 anime movie (and manga it was based on) Akira, at least for now. Warner Bros, which had been trying to make something work for quite a while, has thrown in the towel, and the movie rights have reverted to Kodansha exclusively.
You might wonder why this is a big news item when projects fizzle out in the studio development process all the time. It’s because this isn’t just something WB has been playing around with for a few months, or even a few years. This is something they bought the rights to back in 2002.
Back then, their original plan was to get Stephen Norrington (Blade) to direct Akira, with Jon Peters producing. But apparently after Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen flopped, they decided he wasn’t right for the project after all and dropped them both. The project stayed in limbo for a bit until Leonardo DiCaprio (yes, that one) expressed interest in it, not as an actor but as a producer.
DiCaprio was assigned Jennifer Davisson as co-producer and Legendary stepped in to co-finance Akira, since doing nothing was starting to rack up a fee. It then went through a revolving door of writers and directors in the years after that. The closest it got was a 2012 take that might have starred Kirsten Stewart, Helena Bonham-Carter, Ken Watanabe and Garrett Hedlund (if you don’t remember him, he was in Tron: Legacy). When that didn’t pan out, the project went on hiatus again.
The most recent version WB tinkered with was one where Taika Waititi would have been both writer and director. Greenlit in 2017, it got far enough to land on the schedule at one point (May 21, 2021 is what they said). But Waititi found other interests that took up his time, and this too did not come to pass. In the end, WB spent over eight figures of pre-production money on nothing.
Maybe it’s just as well. Given the way Akira ends, was that something people were hungry to see made real? Doesn’t sound like it’d inspire a return trip to the snack bar. But then again with fleshy horror flicks like The Substance becoming hits lately, what do I know.
[Source: THR]
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