The thing about the live action remake of ‘Akira’ is —be careful, there is a reference to ‘The Simpsons’ here— like cleaning a house: what never ends. Fifteen years have passed since it was announced that Ruari Robinson would be in charge of covering the legendary work of Katsuhiro Ōtomo and, since then, the list of names linked to the project has been constantly changing.
From performers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Robert Pattinson or Justin Timberlake, to directors like the Hughes brothers, Jaume Collet-Serra or Christopher Nolan himself, there have been many names that have ended up being left out; meeting each other a Jordan Peele who decided to get out of production at the right time.
The magnetism of the original
As the director has told in the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he does not regret at all having abandoned ‘Akira’. The reason is that, after all, your personal balance leans unhesitatingly towards creating original content and not existing licenses.
“It’s a project that I’m passionate about. I’m glad I didn’t do it because I feel like… moving away from that, trying to play that IP set me on the path to creating something new. But I want to see Neo-Tokyo. I want to see a full cast. Japanese. I want to feel immersed in his world.”
This is not the first time that the director of ‘Let me out’, ‘Us’ and ‘Nope’ argues something similar regarding the transfer of manga and anime to the big screen. 2017, speaking at Blumhouse.com, already made clear his preference for unpublished stories.
“I think I could do it if the story justifies it. ‘Akira’ is one of my favorite movies, and I think obviously the story justifies as big a budget as you can dream of. But the real question for me is: Do I want to make a pre-existing stuff or do I want to do original content? At the end of the day, I want to do original stuff.”
Finally, ‘Akira’ unexpectedly fell into the hands of Taika Waititi with a release date of 2021. However, production delays allowed him to get down to work with the series ‘Our flag means death’ and with ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’. Will we get to see the flesh and blood versions of Kaneda, Tetsuo and company? I’m beginning to doubt it…