This Akira movie is starting to make further traction toward production a lot sooner than I ever thought possible. This movie has been stuck in development hell for what seems like an eternity up until earlier this year when The Book of Eli director Albert Hughes was attached to the movie but he eventually walked away from the project. The project found renewed life and was recently green-lit with director Jaume Collet-Serra (“Unknown” ) on board for the project. Things are finally starting to fall into place for the once struggling project and it’s now hitting the net that Tron Legacy star Garret Hedlund may take take part in the movie taking on the role of Kaneda.
Source: Get The Big Picture
The actors in the running to play Tetsuo, the main character who is given destructive psychic powers after his encounter with a government experiment, are Ezra Miller and Alden Eherenreich. There’s a good chance you haven’t heard of either of them, but Miller is the star of the much praised independent drama We Need to Talk About Kevin, and Eherenreich starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, so they aren’t exactly unknowns. Garret Hedlund, best known for his role as Sam Flynn in Tron: Legacy, is in talks to play Kaneda, Tetsua’s gang leader and best friend. Gary Oldman, who needs no introduction, is supposedly in talks to play the Colonel, the man assigned to destroy Tetsuo once he becomes dangerous. Helena Bonham Carter and Keira Knightly have also been approached to play roles.
I’d been wondering exactly how they intended to portray this movie and I have to admit that I’m still skeptical about the entire project. They do show intention to try to give the movie some type of credibility by attracting some top talent toward this production, but it’s still very tough to take this project too seriously. The folks at Warner are giving it a helluva an impressionable effort but the original Akira movie was groundbreaking for its time, and deeply rooted in Japanese pop culture of the late 80s, not to mention outright and proudly weird as all hell as a narrative. It’s almost painful to try to imagine how Hollywood may handle the adapting process.
They have to try to make a good and box office successful movie in the adaptation process while maintaining the essence of the work that made it such a hallmark of Anime history in the first place. Some anime fans still undoubtedly find the existence of this production a bit disturbing in the first place, and I may be a long time removed from my days of running an anime site but I do still hold the genre in high regard and would like to some day see an approach that’s enjoyable, taken with care, and retains the appeal of the original property. I just don’t know if this movie is the one to do the job.
Is there anyone in Hollywood that has an original concept in their brain. Leave anime alone; come up with your own ideas. Nobody wants an awful remake of a great anime.
Any anime that is touched by Hollywood is doomed to corruption and decay before it even is premiered.
Games too.
There are still original concepts, just might not be as popular. Believe me, I too can’t forget the brutal Dragonball movie that was produced but the truth is that eventually they’ll get better.
I think comic book movies are still hit or miss but a vast improvement over what we got 10+ years ago, and game/anime movies will follow suit.
I’ve never seen the original akira but I would like a break from comic book movies for a really cool cyberpunk movie. If this does well then hopefully we,ll see more adaptions of great anime instead of comic book movie after comic book.movie
white-washed.
still planning to see it :D
I still plan to see it but i’m also disappointed by the dearth of asian casting. I’m not surprised, just disappointed.
I’m still fairly skeptical about this movie as well. It seems that the movie continues to spiral downwards in terms of bad news. Budget cuts, a less than stellar director, and (personally) it seems like it’s starting to stray away from the important points of the manga/ anime movie. The only thing really giving me hope is some of the casting (love Oldman/ Carter, and while I’ll still feel Hedlund is still too old for Kaneda, he’s still a better casting choice than the others who were brought up before him) and the writer, Steve Kloves.