Hollywood has been trying to remake Akira for more than a decade. Recently, the rumors had stopped, largely because it was believed the studio wanted a budget of $60-$70 million, and that should have been enough to kill the project. But apparently not!
For those unfamiliar, a quick plot summary of Akira: Psychics fight in Tokyo after it gets paved and rebuilt in World War III. There’s more to it than that, a lot more, actually, but the movie is already trying to cram three volumes of manga into a two-hour run time, so it gets rather dense, rather quick.
Anyway, Jaume Collet-Serra, currently plugging Neesons On A Plane, er, Non-Stop, spoke with Collider about it, and when asked what was next? You guessed it.
“I’m focusing on Akira though. I’ve done two movies since I put this little pause on that project… but now powers that be are interested… it’s an overall conceptual thing. You know, it’s how big the movie should be, you know, for the complexity of the concept.”
For us, the main question is whether or not they’d keep the original film’s rich and poetic dialogue:
Joking aside, despite the screaming of anime fans, honestly, Akira could stand to be trimmed down and made less dense as a movie. One of the big problems is that it crams an absurd amount of exposition into a very tiny space. It’s an engaging and influential movie, but that doesn’t make it perfect.
Whether this will ever actually happen is open for debate. The fact that this idea has endured for so long at Warner Brothers indicates that the studio really wants to make the movie, and that usually means it happens eventually. And at the rate we’re going, it’ll probably star Liam Neeson.
Via Collider