Warner Bros. greenlights live-action Akira for 2012
According to Variety, the studio has finally made it official with a greenlight for a $90 million budget and an eye toward a late February/early March start date. The report confirms that Jaume Collett-Serra (Unknown) will direct...

The studio provides this synopsis for the Steve Kloves script: Set in New Manhattan, the cyberpunk sci-fi epic follows the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments.

Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) is a frontrunner for one of the leads (most likely Kaneda) while the shortlist of actors for Tetsuo is allegedly Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield, James McAvoy.

Edit: Thanks to

grrliz, we have news that it does in fact, get worse. Gary Oldman has been offered the role of The Colonel and Helena Bonham Carter has been offered the role of Lady Miyako.

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ekaterinv
2011-10-22 07:59 am UTC (link)

Contrary to what many people seem to believe, most Americans haven't been actually brainwashed by crappy mass media. Also, educational systems vary from state to state and even city to city. Most high school history programs don't even have time to get to Vietnam, let alone 9/11. College classes that cover it investigate it in a lot of depth. Though I'm not really sure what our educational system has to do with this. Most of us who watched those towers fall were adults. And we have families, and friends, and the internet, and the basic ability to use our brains to come to various conclusions about why it happened.

Further, monster movies have been metaphors for one thing or another since the existence of monster movies. That is what the good ones are for, and even the crappy ones generally take a stab at it. Akira itself, as far as I can tell, is an extended metaphor for certain things that really happened in history. Culturally appropriating it to twist it into a metaphor for a different thing, because Hollywood falsely thinks Americans are too stupid to understand what Akira is really about, is the problem. Well, one of the many problems.

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