The
long awaited live-action Hollywood adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga and
1988 anime film Akira was looking all set to go earlier this year and then it
wasn’t. In the last ten years Jaume Collet-Serra (The Shallows), Jordan Peele
(Us), Justin Lin (Fast Five), Daniel Espinosa (Life) and David Sandberg (Shazam)
have all been linked to direct the film. And then Taika Waititi then came
onboard and was set to direct,. He decided he didn’t want to change the manga
setting and use Asian actors. The film got a $20 million tax credit from the
California Film Commission and things were set, then they weren’t. Waititi was
announced as the director of Thor: Love and Thunder which will go into
production later this yeas and Waititi has taken on Next Goal Wins, which will
go into production soon. Waititi told IGN, “Unfortunately, the timing with
Akira, because we’ve been working really hard on the script, we had to keep
pushing the start date for the shoot. We ended up having to push it a couple
weeks too far, which actually ate into the Thor schedule, because they were very
close together. And that got pushed again and again, and it just got too far
into the Thor schedule to be able to make it work. And my first commitment was
to Marvel to make that film, so now I’ve kind of had to take Akira and sort of
shift it around to the tail-end of Thor and move it down a couple of years.”
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