Live-action recreations of popular anime have always proven difficult, and in the pantheon of such troubled productions there sits Warner Bros.'
Akira right at the top. The film has been in development for years, spending a good chunk of that comically trying to find someone to star in it and largely failing. Heck, they considered Keanu Reeves to play the teenaged biker
Kaneda until he wisely turned it down. And that doesn't begin to approach the failures on the directing side until Jaume Collet-Serra (
Orphan) came aboard. But after sitting dormant for some time
we learned last year that it was back on, and the studio has decided on a screenwriter who has experience in these kinds of adaptations.
Dante Harper, who wrote the initial script for Doug Liman's
Edge of Tomorrow, itself an adaptation of a popular manga, is working on a new screenplay for
Akira.
Deadline mentioned the news rather offhandedly in the midst of another story about Harper's hiring to rewrite
The Secret of the Temple for the studio. Strangely, Harper didn't get a screenwriting credit on
Edge of Tomorrow which suggests the three added writers did some major revisions.
Garrett Hedlund had been on board to play Kaneda at the time production was shut down and it's unclear if he has any current involvement. Harper and Collet-Serra are working on the story that was rumored to be moving the
action from futuristic Neo Tokyo to New York City. And before you ask, yes that's a fan made poster of how Hedlund
hopefully won't might look in the film. The '2013' date tells you just how long this movie has been kicking around the Warner Bros. offices.
