The Cursed History of the Live-Action Akira Movie

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

Warner Bros. can never let Akira go. This movie studio has been through countless regime changes in the last 15+ years, the priorities of this company have dramatically evolved, and entire franchises have risen and fallen in that period. However, no matter the year, Warner Bros. brass remains convinced that a live-action American Akira movie is something the world needs. This proposed Akira remake would've been based on the 1988 animated Japanese film of the same name. That project, helmed by Katsuhiro Otomo, was based on the director's anime from years earlier. Widely acclaimed and influential on global pop culture (just look at how many properties have paid tribute to the "Akira slide), Warner Bros. brass have seen a potential goldmine in bringing Akira to the silver screen as a live-action blockbuster.

Over the years, Warner Bros. has managed to get several tormented blockbusters that went through endless creative teams out into theaters in some finished form, namely King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and The Legend of Tarzan. But Akira has been one nut that Warner Bros. can’t crack, with the studio instead settling for referencing it extensively in Warner Bros. tentpoles like Ready Player One. Not that the studio hasn’t tried. Oh God, has Warner Bros. tried. If we’re to examine the cursed existence of this live-action Akira movie, we must take a cue from one of the first hit songs by Dan+Shay and go back to “where it all began.”

A secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath who can only be stopped by a teenager, his gang of biker friends and a group of psychics.

Leonardo DiCaprio has a lot of sway in the film industry, and his producing credits through his production company, Appian Way, have been erratic and bizarre. He’s got a producing credit on the 2018 Robin Hood movie, for example, and DiCaprio was a key creative figure on the first iteration of the American Akira movie. This actor united with Warner Bros. Pictures to produce a remake that somebody out there was demanding. Oscar-nominated short film director Ruairi Robinson was set to make his feature-length directorial debut on Akira, which was poised to launch as soon as summer 2009.

In a March 2008 interview, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt responded to rumors that he and DiCaprio would be playing the two lead roles of Akira in a coy fashion, noting that the script wasn't finished for Akira. However, if that screenplay turned out to be any good, he'd be curious to anchor the movie considering he loved the original Akira. DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon-Levitt headlining a live-action Akira movie is as quintessentially a piece of 2008 casting as the notion of Jay Leno and Pat Morita anchoring a cop movie is quintessential late 1980s casting. This rumored casting also sparked an unfortunate default norm for this remake: white casting for the lead characters.

Despite being a property hailing from Japan, Warner Bros. was angling to get the whitest artists possible to make and star in this new Akira. This troublesome approach is emblematic of decades of whitewashing in Hollywood, with American movie studios all too happy to utilize visuals and locations specific to Asian culture, but rarely offering actors of Asian descent a chance to anchor major motion pictures. This egregious act of white-washing (or at least this iteration of it) never got realized, though, as this incarnation of Akira was dead by June 2009. That seemed to be the end of things until September 2009, when a report broke that screenwriters Mark Fergus and Hawk Otsby were toiling away on a new draft of the feature. The world wasn’t spared a live-action American Akira movie just yet.

The next major update for Akira would arrive in February 2010, when the Hughes Brothers were announced to be helming the feature. This came just a few weeks after the directorial duo’s The Book of Eli had turned into a smash hit for Warner Bros. Pictures. The studio was clearly pleased with this pair of directors and wanted them to crack the code on this Akira adaptation. By the start of 2011, Steve Kloves, a screenwriting veteran of the Harry Potter movies, was now penning the script for Akira. Warner Bros. seemed to be hoping the combination of all these figures associated with then-recent Warner Bros. hits (Kloves, Hughes, DiCaprio) could somehow magically spawn a hit Akira movie. Throw enough darts at the board, you'll get something lucrative…right?

Right after this news dropped, the first casting wishlist for Akira broke, which also confirmed that this American film would be keeping character names like Tetsuo and Kaneda. The list reads like a cacophony of Caucasian chaos, with Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield, and James McAvoy being eyeballed for Tetsuo while a slew of names (including Garrett Hedlund, Justin Timberlake, and the most in-demand early 2010s blockbuster leading man, Michael Fassbender) were attached to Kaneda. Timberlake had been getting into acting full-time at the start of the 2010s with The Social Network and Friends with Benefits. Playing a man named Kaneda was a possible next step for the actor's burgeoning leading man career.

As Collider looks back at classic films, a first-time watcher reviews ‘Akira,’ one of the most important Japanese movies ever.

In hindsight, what’s especially darkly amusing about this tone-deaf collection of possible casting choices is that it’s not just all white people, it’s the whitest folks imaginable. McAvoy and Fassbender are European actors who are so darn white that they play physical embodiments of white power structures in films like The Book of Clarence and 12 Years a Slave. This endlessly troublesome casting had to be put on pause when Albert Hughes left the production. Now without a director, Akira would secure Jaume Collet-Serra just a few weeks later as its new filmmaker. This maneuver (which put a director most well-known at the time for Unknown and Orphan) into the driver's seat of a massive tentpole preceded Collet-Serra's jump to blockbusters like Jungle Cruise and Black Adam by roughly a decade.

This version of Akira was picking up steam, with Garrett Hedlund in talks to secure the part of Kaneda by the end of the year (an interesting reversal of how he was initially being looked at for the role of Tetsuo). Hedlund left moviegoers all over the world going "who is this boring guy?" when he headlined Tron: Legacy just a year earlier, so naturally, it was time to hand him more blockbuster movie roles. Kristen Stewart was signed on to play Kei by the end of 2011, which meant Akira was now set to be one of her first big post-Twilight roles, while actors like Toby Kebbell, Paul Dano, and future Oscar-winner Rami Malek were testing for the role of Tetsuo. This iteration of Akira seemed temporarily unstoppable, but in January 2012, just weeks before shooting would’ve begun, Warner Bros. shut down Akira to try and get its budget reduced. The studio had been putting other blockbusters (like Arthur & Lancelot) on ice around this time, meaning this version of Akira was a victim of much larger studio politics.

In February 2014, two years after Akira had fallen apart, Collet-Serra expressed hope that maybe Akira could be his next directorial effort, though just one year later, he revealed that the project had been shelved again. Akira seemed to be endlessly cursed, though that wasn’t stopping Warner Bros. from trying to secure Get Out director Jordan Peele to helm the movie in May 2017. Being courted for this job led to Peele publicly revealing that he was not only not interested in helming Akira, but that he’d be focusing on original directorial efforts for the foreseeable future. Even with this directorial pursuit not panning out, Warner Bros. still wanted to make this remake a reality, and by September 2017, the studio had secured Taika Waititi to helm Akira.

Getting the job just before Thor: Ragnarok hit theaters, Waititi’s presence gave Akira a hot new filmmaker steering the ship creatively. Waititi also explained in a subsequent interview about Akira that he was planning to incorporate a racially diverse cast for the film and would be taking cues from the Akira manga rather than the 1988 anime feature. By May 2019, it looked like this tormented project was finally happening thanks to the feature securing permission to film in California and a high-profile May 2021 release date. Then, once again, Akira was struck down, this time by Waititi's plans to direct Thor: Love and Thunder. By February 2020, Waititi cast doubt on him ever directing Akira,while in November 2023 he revealed that he didn't have any interest in returning to the world of big-budget studio movies. Needless to say, this is yet another incarnation of the movie that’s gone the way of the dodo.

There have been no real updates on Akira in the 2020s, an unsurprising development given that COVID-19 upended the entertainment landscape and Warner Bros. has gone through so many corporate overhauls in the last few years. Still, the smash success of something like One Piece for Netflix means it's only a matter of time before Warner Bros. tries its hand at adapting this material again. The only question is…why? Warner Bros. executives have been weirdly paradoxical in their approach to this property. Akira is supposedly a can’t-miss brand name with so much power and ubiquity that it simply must be made into an American movie. Also, it’s too “risky” of a property to spend too much money on (reports from 2012 indicated that WB didn’t want the film to cost more than $60 million) and there are clearly endless problems with translating this material to the world of American cinema.

Why not just spend all this development money on something new and original? Countless high-profile people (from producer DiCaprio to Waititi to The Hughes Brothers) have been tasked with trying to make Akira work when their efforts could’ve been spent on bringing something fresh into the world. The most cynical interpretation of Warner Bros. spending so much time and energy on an Akira remake is that this conglomerate wants to automatically have “ownership” of iconic imagery associated with Akira. Even if this studio didn’t make those characters, a live-action version could give the studio behind The Dark Knight some “claim” to them. With such creepy potential corporate motivations behind this endeavor, it’s really for the best Akira has never made it to the silver screen despite endless attempts to make this cursed adaptation a reality.

Akira is available to stream on Hulu in the U.S.

Watch on Hulu

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

The animation and style of these movies put them in a league of their own.

Can you guess what movie 'Ratatoing' is ripping off?

"Why do fireflies have to die so soon?"

"My name is Gene. I'm a MEH emoji."

These unfortunate horror films feel barely stitched together.

"It was the Boogeyman."