“Expect an update about it in the next couple of months,” says an Akira producer, reviving interest in a project long been considered dead.
Given just how poorly Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love And Thunder was received in 2022, it wasn’t particularly surprising when talk of Taika Waititi helming several big franchises seemed to stall. News on his planned Star Wars film went quiet, as did any further chatter regarding his adaptation of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s beloved Japanese anime (and manga) that has long been considered unfilmable, despite a host of filmmakers at Warner Bros making attempts to get it up and running.
Jordan Peele was said to be involved at one point; Taika Waititi was definitely attached; Justin Lin, Daniel Espinosa, Stephen Norrington, David Sanberg, Ruairi Robinson, Jaume Collet-Serra and Albert Hughes are other directors who at one point or another have been involved in a project which seems destined to never see the light of day.
The reason for that is complicated. Perhaps even more so than Godzilla, the story’s themes are linked to Japan’s status as history’s only victim of an atomic bomb. Moving the tale from Japan robs it of much of the context that made the original Akira so memorable. Then there’s the casting problem too: a blockbuster of this size would need movie stars familiar to western audiences to support it and Warner Bros will remember the claims of whitewashing that plagued Paramount’s Ghost In The Shell, a 2017 live-action take on an iconic anime that controversially starred Scarlett Johansson.
However, it seems like the project is still alive, with Taika Waititi still at the helm. The filmmaker has been busy these past few months working on his adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara And The Sun, featuring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams. After that, though? Perhaps some kind of update on the fabled Akira adaptation.
One of the project’s producers, Andrew Lazar, is now saying that Akira is happening, and that we should “expect an update in the next couple of months.”
Lazar was speaking on the YouTube channel Moovy TV (see embed above) and suggested that we’ll be hearing more on the project in fairly short order. Waititi did get pretty close to making the film apparently, but any progress was halted when Marvel came calling with the offer of a Thor sequel.
On top of that, Lucasfilm also recently revealed that Waititi’s long-dormant Star Wars project is still in development, although after several years without any updates, we’re not sure we’ll believe that one until we see evidence that it exists. Could Akira be next for Waititi? We should find out in the coming months.
When we hear more, we’ll definitely let you know.
