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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quietladybirman
2011-10-30 07:02 am UTC (link)

I'm so late on this, but this gives me such a sad.

Anecdote time, sorry. I love Akira and have done since I was eleven. It was the movie that got me into manga and anime fandom back when manga and anime were still relatively unheard-of.

I spent a few days with my parents about a month back specifically because the film society near where they lived was showing Akira and my father thought I might want to go see it. I'd never had the chance to see it at the cinema before. The cinema in question was in a small university town in England, and the audience must have been at least 95% white. I have never been to a movie where the audience were that rapt. Normally people talk, or they fidget, or they generally show signs that someone, somewhere, is Not Really Paying Attention - didn't happen there. People applauded at the end of the screening. I have only been to one other film in my life where that happened.

This is the world Hollywood apparently thinks that audiences won't get, the characters they believe that white audiences are too culturally blinkered to relate to. I - and my father, and most likely damn near everyone else in that auditorium a month back - would respectfully like to disagree. Thank you.

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	bishounenhideto 2011-10-30 08:20 am UTC (link)
	Beautifully said. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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