For years, Warner Bros.has been trying to develop the popular manga/anime AKIRA for a live-action film adaptation, but time and again, they have failed. But most recently, Jaume Collet-Serra (Unknown) was attached to direct with a cast that plans to include Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Helena Bonham Carter, and Ken Watanabe. Collet-Serra and WB had managed to reduce the budget down to somewhere between $60 million and $70 million. [continue after the jump]
Jaume Collet-Serra had just completed filming on the airplane thriller Non-Stop with Liam Neeson, Collet-Serra is currently in pre-production on the Warner Bros. thriller Run All Night, which also stars Neeson alongside Joel Kinnaman and Ed Harris. Collet-Serra plans to move straight into Akira in the spring of 2014, once he’s completed work on Run All Night.
AKIRA depicts a dystopian version of Tokyo in the year 2019, with cyberpunk tones. The plot focuses on teenage biker Tetsuo Shima and his psychic powers, and the leader of his biker gang, Shotaro Kaneda. Kaneda tries to prevent Tetsuo from releasing the imprisoned psychic Akira. While most of the character designs and settings were adapted from the original 2182-page manga epic, the restructured plot of the movie differs considerably from the print version, pruning much of the last half of the manga.
The film became a hugely popular cult film and is widely considered to be a landmark in Japanese animation.
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