Warner Brothers is moving forward with a live-action version of Akira.
The studio gave the green light to the movie this week. According to Variety, Jaume Collet-Serra will direct the movie and Tron: Legacy’s Garrett Hedlund could be the leading man in the film.
Akira will be based on the original manga by Katsuhiro Otomo, depicting a sci-fi cyberpunk dystopia, but will relocate the action to “New Manhattan” rather than “Neo-Tokyo.”
Hedlund’s involvement is only tentative at the moment, but he would up be for the part of the original story’s Kaneda (there is not yet word on whether or not the character names will be changed).
Budgeted at $90 million, Akira could shoot as early as February of next year.
Re-locating it to the US? Yep, that's FAIL. The whole point of Akira is the latent cultural trauma of the Japanese people. The story doesn't work anywhere else but Japan. The producers and the idiot that pitched this should be taken to Japan and shown Hiroshima and Nagasaki.