WTF Happened to the Akira Live Action Film - It's Been in Development Hell for 20 Years

[00:00:00]Johnny!

[00:00:05]>> Akira is one of the biggest names in anime. It's a foundational and iconic work in the cyberpunk genre, and to not acknowledge its immense influence on modern filmmaking is absolutely foolish.

[00:00:16]This success led to Hollywood spending decades trying to make a live-action Akira work, but due to logistical issues, it's never happened. Rest assured, that's probably a sign from God that people shouldn't try to tamper with the legacy of Akira by making a half-assed live-action adaptation.

[00:00:32]Pre-production stint with multiple producers, writers, and odd ideas for premise changes makes us extremely happy that the live-action version never actually came out. And yet, multiple announcements were made about it very optimistically over the years, only for them to amount to nothing. So, WTF actually went wrong with Akira's possible live-action adaptation? Well, that's the topic of today's video, and it's going to be a good one, so let's get right into it.

[00:01:05]How Akira spent 20-plus years in development hell. Akira is an absurdly influential piece of work. That's no secret. It revolutionized cyberpunk, it revolutionized anime in the eyes of the West, and it's inspired works such as The Matrix and much of Kanye West's musical career, namely the music video for Stronger and even the Earth Dome stage from his latest tour. The examples are never-ending, and in most cases, that would signal that Hollywood would want to make a live-action adaptation.

[00:01:35]Whether it would work or not isn't the point. The fact remains that Hollywood would shoot their shot with a live-action adaptation, and yet, a work as iconic as Akira has never gotten one.

[00:01:45]Not because Hollywood doesn't want to make an adaptation of Akira, but because the plans have never really proceeded beyond the pre-production phase.

[00:01:53]Hollywood's been trying for more than two decades now, but the idea of a live-action Akira remains stuck in development hell. Numerous writers and directors have joined the roster to make it work. Warner Bros., a Hollywood titan, had the rights to pull it off from 2002 to 2025. After rigorous changes to the roster and possible teams coming in and leaving like they were going through a revolving door, Taika Waititi, best known for his Academy Award-winning work on Jojo Rabbit and the MCU's Thor Ragnarok, was Warner's last bid. And he came close to pulling it off than anyone before him across almost 20 years. A 2019 summer schedule was planned, and a 2021 release was expected, but Waititi's packed schedule acted as a massive obstacle to the point that Warner Bros. ended up exhausting their ownership over the rights to recreate Akira. Following this, they failed to renew their rights, causing Akira to fall back into the hands of Kodansha, but more on this later. At present, there is a chance for another bidding process, which would once again put the project back on a possible track with the roster for writers, producers, and talent changing once again. But it's the visual complexity of Akira that makes this a ridiculously difficult movie to execute in live-action, even with a budget that looks more like a phone number. But the culprit here isn't an unwillingness to adapt Akira, but rather the immense effort that will actually be needed to do it. And even then, it might just turn out to be a dud. After all, animation to live-action adaptations are notoriously bad. And a work with momentum like Akira can't afford to be poorly adapted. It also doesn't have the privilege of being bad like Dragon Ball Evolution was, as Akira isn't a long drawn-out series, but rather a short manga and a film.

[00:03:42]Warner Bros. locks the rights and stalls for two decades. An eight-digit range had been proposed for the budget, not just because Warner Bros. was serious when it came to making Akira, but because they wanted to launch a major cyberpunk franchise. Circling back to the part where I mentioned the constant change in roster, reported figures state that 10 different writers and five different producers came and went, and all of them were big names, including Taika Waititi. Tens of millions of dollars were spent, but all in vain because the development hell seemingly came with a perpetually sealed door. You would think in two decades there would be something. Maybe not a trailer, but some storyboards, some shots, something.

[00:04:21]But, we haven't gotten a single glimpse of Neo-Tokyo in the flesh. And now new creators and talent are jumping ship to replace Warner Bros as the next new owner of the rights to Akira now that the work is back under Kodansha. And it might work since cyberpunk's been having a pretty good run in the mainstream since the release of Cyberpunk 2077, but you may have noticed that CGI today doesn't seem as good as CGI 10 or 15 years ago. Technologically, the CGI is much better now, but with everyone using it, we do get to see a lot of CGI work that's the product of extreme cost cutting, which results in poorer quality than say Paramount's Transformers. Under Warner Bros, the budget necessary for CGI that can make Akira look good would not have been a problem. The next studio might be different, although it's unlikely that the rights will be won by someone who can't afford to go all out.

[00:05:10]So, hope isn't exactly lost, but it's still absurd how even two decades under Warner Bros wasn't enough to get the lights rolling. As it stands, Akira is set in the far future of 2019, which today is the past. In many ways, time seems to have run out.

[00:05:27]Whitewashing fears, Neo-Manhattan, and a backlash they couldn't ignore.

[00:05:31]Hollywood's track record with having whitewashed non-white or non-Western work isn't lost on people. Case in point, Scarlett Johansson playing Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, which became the butt of all jokes. And unfortunately, they intended to do something similar with live-action Akira. The source material is neither built for live action nor is it Western in atmosphere. It's set in a futuristic but dystopian Tokyo and the cast should ideally be completely Japanese or at the very least Asian. But Hollywood wanted to relocate the setting from Neo-Tokyo to an American city, which takes away a lot of the essence of Akira. Historical reasons matter, too, since a lot of Japanese animated works are directly inspired by the nuclear bombing of Japan, which is why we see the explosive dome imagery in not just Akira, but all sorts of different anime. You see the mushroom cloud in Hunter Hunter. You see a mushroom cloud turned into broccoli in Mob Psycho. You see concepts such as Dragon Ball Z's spirit bomb and Naruto's tailed beast bombs for this very reason.

[00:06:31]The Neo-Tokyo premise also works due to the aesthetics of 1980s Japan.

[00:06:36]Naturally, shifting Akira from a Japanese setting to an American one yields disingenuous and not at all lore accurate. I don't mean to say that an American setting couldn't be enjoyable.

[00:06:46]They very much can be, especially for non-Americans. This change in location messes up the lore accuracy, though.

[00:06:52]We've seen this blunder from Hollywood time and time again across anime adaptations, the most notorious being Dragon Ball Evolution and Death Note.

[00:07:00]Akira works so well for its Japanese setting. The geography is distinct, the architecture is distinct, the idea of bright neon lights in Tokyo works very well for Japanese cyberpunk, and as such, a futuristic fictional American setting cannot capture that essence.

[00:07:16]There's a scene in Akira where Tetsuo Shima mutates. It's exaggerated, obviously, but the concept is rooted in the atomic bombings effectively changing the physiology and DNA of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to their extreme exposure to radiation.

[00:07:31]Allegedly, the writers wanted to swap this out and use 9/11 as the formative tragedy, which would obviously come off as insensitive and lazy. Then there's the casting, which within an American setting would be America-centric.

[00:07:44]Personally, we think this is a huge flaw within Hollywood's race-swapping tendencies. It starts off with swapping non-white characters for white characters, such as Major Kusanagi, and even the actors for Goku and Bulma in Evolution. It's possible to swap out a character's race, but you have to be careful about how you do it. That sort of thing can change a lot about an adaptation. I mean, Japan has a special relationship with the nuclear bomb, and that's an essential theme in Akira. When a character's tied to a specific culture's folklore, you can't just swap their skin color and expect everything else to stay the same. Diversity is better attained by adapting stories and folk tales from across the world instead of bad race swaps. This is what reportedly led to Warner Brothers often lagging behind with Akira, which is funny because they should have stuck to the original lore in the first place. If they wanted to Americanize it, they should have just gone a different route and told the story inspired by Akira.

[00:08:37]There's also the problem of high-quality animations translating poorly to live-action. The eerie hallucinations, the motorcycle lights, the transformation of Tetsuo, none of it can work outside of animation. I don't want to see a monster CGI Tetsuo blob. Anime also relies on exaggerated facial expressions that look goofy on humans, and the lack of exaggeration minimizes its impact. It's a lose-lose situation.

[00:09:02]A revolving door of directors, writers, and visions. Multiple directors cycled through the project. Stephen Norrington, Ruairi Robinson, the Hughes brothers, and eventually Jaume Collet-Serra. Each name was attached to Akira, and each director had a different idea for how they wish to execute the film. But, either way, the issue with a movie lies in the involvement of a big village in terms of manpower. Producers, directors, writers, actors, executives, everyone has their two cents to add. And this leads to major creative differences, especially with people wanting to make changes that would make the story more appropriate for a live-action format.

[00:09:38]Some wanted the film to be grittier, some wanted it funnier, some wanted it to stick to the lore-accurate storyline from the manga, but bigger issues take away from the original story wherein writer Katsuhiro Otomo had absolute creative control since he wrote and drew the entirety of Akira. And yet, despite having their mangaka sanctioned freedom, nothing came out of the prep work for Akira. But, Otomo himself wished for writers to be more bold and ambitious with his story. The biggest culprits throughout everything seems to be a lack of vision and Akira being a cultural landmark for Japanese animation as a whole.

[00:10:13]The 2019 it's finally happening moment that fell apart. The year 2019 was a hopeful one for fans of cyberpunk. Akira had high chances of finally getting the green light, more so as a result of Taika Waititi being a prominent force [music] in its adaptation. Unlike the former, more whitewashed Hollywood scripts, Taika Waititi's Akira was set to be much more accurate to the manga.

[00:10:34]Allegedly, he wanted an all-Asian cast, too, for the sake of authenticity instead of pulling another Ghost in the Shell debacle. But, Waititi's previous work, that is Thor: Ragnarok, which released in 2017, did fantastic at the box office. Waititi became the first director in the MCU who acquired a reputation for making Thor's character work. The Norse god was super serious for the first two Thor films and in the first two Avengers films, but Waititi changed the tides with Ragnarok to the point that the majority of the sequel's success can be attributed to him. This led to him securing a spot for directing Thor: Love and Thunder, which released in 2022, which meant he was busy from 2019 to 2021, which was his alleged schedule for Akira. And the MCU is a huge commitment as well. It wouldn't have been possible for one person to handle that while handling Akira, and one had to go. With the MCU's pull and money, the choice was simple as Waititi chose Thor. In conclusion, the stars had aligned, but studio fear and competition kept resulting in the idea being shelved. While Love and Thunder didn't fare as well as Ragnarok, Waititi was heavily involved in the project, more so than he ever could be with Akira. This isn't our personal bias either, it's due to Akira's complexity. The story is psychologically complex and difficult to pull off, even with a fantastic budget.

[00:11:53]And of course, there's the part where you [music] have to ace certain scenes, some easier, like Akira's signature motorcycle drift, where others are more complex, like the intense body horror elements.

[00:12:04]Leonardo DiCaprio's potential role as a producer. DiCaprio isn't just a prolific actor, but also a film producer who has not only produced [music] films he himself stars in, such as Wolf of Wall Street, but also other works with heavyweight [music] names, such as the horror film Orphan. This is proof of his versatility as a producer, which is on brand [music] for a multifaceted actor like him. Unfortunately, the public praise ends there, as the majority of his production career has been plagued by low box office numbers [music] to the point that the term DiCaprio curse was coined. Interestingly, he was set to be the producer for Waititi's Akira, and was on the roster even before Waititi's directorial position became debated. We had a fun [music] theory for a while that if the project did go through with DiCaprio as a producer, Akira would end up doing well because [music] DiCaprio's curse, a negative, would cancel out the curse of the film itself, as Akira seemed to be stuck in development hell with no light at the end of the tunnel.

[00:12:57]Maybe [music] two negatives could have made a positive, huh?

[00:13:00]Why adapting Akira might be almost impossible. After talking about the logistics [music] and the behind-the-scenes drama, let's address why it's just madness to imagine a live-action Akira. To put it simply, the story is incredibly hard to film, almost [music] impossible if you consider the quality of said filming. The only simple portion of the film would be the gang wars of Neo Tokyo and the psychic children. Everything else, madness.

[00:13:23]Transformations, psychic battles, [music] a decayed society that visually relies on its urban beauty, that's pretty tough for a live-action adaptation. Akira's magic lies in being animated. Had Waititi continued with the project, we doubt it would have been great since he does well with [music] more comedic tones. He's good with an amount of seriousness like in Jojo Rabbit, but his works are never devoid of comedy and that's one of his biggest strengths.

[00:13:46][music] Akira, in our opinion, wouldn't do well with that kind of direction, but even the greatest director in human history, working with the greatest CGI of all time while having funding from Wakanda, [music] couldn't make Akira work in live-action, in our opinion, because it's something that needs to be animated. And very specifically, it needs Japanese animation.

[00:14:06]>> [music] >> Making a live-action Akira is like inviting Whitney Houston over and getting her to rap instead of sing.

[00:14:12]Sure, she has the voice, but aren't you kind of missing the point? Could a Japanese-led adaptation finally break the curse? If Hollywood is destined to mess it up, then why can't Japan make a good version? Great question. The sad answer is Japan, too, makes some bland adaptations. It's not as bad as Hollywood, but it's not encouraging, to say the least.

[00:14:32]>> [music] >> Kodansha knows that, but Japan still operates better than the West in this field. I mean, that's obvious since this is Japan's domain, but [music] I doubt we'll get anything from Japan in the near future. If they had to adapt Akira into a live-action story, they would have done [music] it. But so far, they've chosen not to. Because Akira works the way it works, two-dimensional, [music] hand-drawn, and absolutely beautiful. Not every masterpiece needs to be reinvented. In fact, masterpieces, by definition, kind of don't need to be reinvented. We, as a society, should respect animation as an art form without feeling the need for a live-action variant. The possibilities are limitless when you're not nerfed by having to overpay for CGI. And with that, this video comes to an end and we hope you enjoyed it. Let us know your thoughts on the Akira remake in the comments down below. But otherwise, thanks for watching. [music] stay safe out there and have an amazing day. See you next time.