There’s a cliche in Hollywood about certain properties being “unfilmable.” Now, if Game of Thrones has taught us anything, it’s that this idea is pretty much nonsense. With the right team and vision, anything is filmable.
That said, some things are much harder to believably translate than others. For example, various people have been trying to make a live-action version of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s hugely influential 1988 anime movie set in the chaotic metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, for years. Keanu Reeves was involved at one point, then Garrett Hedlund…it went on and on, but nothing stuck, perhaps because the prospect of rendering the bit where whiny biker Tetsuo turns into a giant tragic flesh monster was too daunting.
But no more! Deadline reports that the Arika movie now has a release date: May 21, 2021. At the helm is Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi, who stepped away from a very important biopic of Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee Bubbles to make this picture (really).
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Waititi is a smart choice. It’s still gonna be hard to pull off Akira’s demented, oppressive vision of a future turned upside down (the original Arika is set in 2019, FYI), but Waititi has great creative instincts and a way with the psychedelic, so we can hope.
There’s no word on who will star in the movie yet. All of the important characters are teenagers, so hopefully we’re looking at a bunch of unknowns.
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h/t The A.V. Club