Akira Has Been Greenlit

In a time when Peter Jackson can turn New Zealand into Middle Earth, Sam Raimi made Spider-Man swing through Manhattan for a decade and Zack Snyder can faithfully (too much so according to some) adapt Watchmen, we can’t truthfully say a live-action take of Akira is unfilmable.

It's doable with today's advanced technology, yes. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea. If you've read the manga or like most saw the 1988 anime film, anyone would think to themselves, "OK, how do you turn that into a movie and spend more money than James Cameron did on Avatar?"

Such a task has been tried by Warner Brothers and the Leonardo DiCaprio-co run production-company Appian Way dating back to 2008. During the build-up to the WGA Strike in the fall of 2007 and fear of SAG following suit the next summer, Akira was one of several properties the studio announced they intended to fast-track to fill their empty-summer 2009 slots.

It went through several directors like Ruairi Robinson and Albert Hughes, many of the "Hot" twenty-to-thirtysomething actors for the lead roles of Kaneda and Tetsuo and even serious intentions for this to be a two-film series. None of those plans transpired but the studio kept fighting the good fight with the hiring of Spanish filmmaker Jaume Collet-Serra (recently delivering the Liam Neeson-starring actioner Unknown) this past July.

I never thought Akira was going to happen. Honestly, I still don't but this wouldn't be the first time I'm wrong. Variety reports after months worth of budget-trimmings and number-crunching WB has greenlit the production with the end of February/beginning of March being eyed as the start date and Garrett Hedlund (who didn't light the world on fire after Tron: Legacy) is a front-runner for one of the afore-mentioned leads; probably Kaneda if you want me to guess.

Besides the obvious "We'll shoot the whole damn thing on green-screen" approach, I don't see how they can pull this off for the reported below $100 million budget. But again, I'm in the "I'll believe it when I see it" stage with this one.