Hollywood announces new live action Akira films
Paul •
Hollywood news outlets are reporting that a live action film version of Akira has been pushed into production by Warner Bros. with a view to being fast-tracked and released by the summer of 2009; to be more specific, two movies in this new adaptation of Akira are being planned and they intend to cover all of Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal six-volume manga series; the movies, which will cover three volumes each, are already being described as “Blade Runner” meets “City of God.” The films will be directed by relative newcomer Ruairi Robinson, an Irish man with no big budget credits to his name, while Aint It Cool News suggests that Joseph Gordon Levitt will be playing Tetsuo and “have it on good authority” that Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on as Kaneda.
Arguably the most controversial aspect is that the story will now be set in “New Manhattan” (“a metropolis that was rebuilt after being destroyed 31 years earlier”), as opposed to the original setting of Neo-Tokyo. Given this major change, it remains to be seen what else has been removed from Otomo’s beloved original story to accommodate this new Hollywood production.
