Well Well…..It’s coming, or at least it’s secured financing and most of it’s creative force. Warner Bro’s studios says that Akira the live action movie will be the cash cow milked till it dies, or at least that’s what Variety reports:
the film’s current story goes as follows “Set in New Manhattan, the cyberpunk sci-fi epic follows the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments.”
Variety had reported in July that Warner hired director Jaume Collett-Serra (Unknown, Orphan, House of Wax) to direct the film, which was “being reenvisioned as a $90 million” blockbuster project. In May, previous director Albert Hughes left the project due to “creative differences” on the film.
Fan boys will either be really happy about this or really really angry. I honestly can say Hollywood has never truly been able to reproduce a video game or anime successfully enough to please the fans of the source content. It’s near impossible to do that but can be done, so why not make the movie exact to the source material? Well it really depends on the source material, budget and target audience. You have to find a balance, a great example of success with this sort of thing would be Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, the movies could not cover all the material but still succeeded at telling the story and building the characters and delivering high levels of general entertainment.
Anime has a lot of story telling in it, and is complex and in some cases to foreign for Americans to understand. This is why it is almost always downplayed and simplified. Not to mention in some cases the production team has no clue about the source material; The do not understand the story/cast/plot/background before undertaking the production. The writers and script monkeys also take a lot of creative freedoms and sometimes even the director decides that he does not like the source material and wants to simply do whatever he feels is right instead of sticking true to the source material. All that said in some cases creative ideas can help tell the story better to Americans but it will piss off the fans who are already very familur with the source material. Now refer back to that sentience where I said it was all about balance, yep it’s not easy and that’s why I think Akira the Live action movie is going to turn out bad already. I has a truck load of source material to screw up.
Not looking at it under a bad light I really would like to see a live action Akira, but I would rather not see another 90 million dollar flop like Speed Racer or AstroBoy, poor anime never stood a chance. Hollywood can do it right, but 9 out of 10 times they do it so wrong, I guess that’s the fanboy in me screaming out, quit killing my childhood Holly Wood!
Ya this video could become reality soon!
You forgot Dragonball and Tekken and King of Fighters and Street Fighter and yeah.
Oh thanks for reminding me lol, oh god those were bad.