Last month, from info reported at Bloody Disgusting, Devin wrote the obituary on the live-action adaptation of Akira. Comic Con is nothing if not a place for people to inadvertently announce projects while they are promoting others, and it has happened again. While speaking about Jonah Hex at the Warner Brothers panel on Friday, ifmagazine.com reports that producer Andrew Lazar spoke of the Akira project with some enthusiasm.
“We are working on the script… It is a real priority project for Warner Bros. and so [the writers] are working on a draft.”
Lazar continued on to say that Akira could be expected no sooner than 2011, and that no cast or principle crew has yet been recruited.
I’ve always detected an ambivalence among fans and the apathetic alike concerning such an adaptation- some think it could develop into something interesting, while others worry that a sacred cow of sorts will be butchered. I’m far from Akira’s biggest fan, so I’m apathetic at best about this announcement. A well-CGI’d amorphous monster crashing through a futuristic “New Manhattan,” absorbin’ folks left and right could be good fun, I suppose. This is not the value that most fans ascribe to the film though, so I’ll leave the argument of the project’s value to those more invested.
The thing to remember is that this project has seriously faltered already, and nothing is greenlit, so this could always be just a twitch of the corpse.