To quote one of the finest philosophers of the late 20th century: “Some motherfuckers always gotta ice-skate uphill.”
The news was announced late last night, while about 70% of the nerdly world was holding vibrating toy brooms firmly between their knees like a Jack Nicholson Chicken Sandwich, waiting for Harry Potter to play out. Warners must have known this would be the case – why else let slip, like a silent fart into a breeze, the news that their live-action adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s classic manga Akira is back on.
Jaume Collet-Serra will be running this show. He has directed films for WB on the cheap before, to generally positive results, such as House of Wax, which made about 20 million alone on the promise that he would brutally murder Paris Hilton within the runtime, or Orphan, about a creepy girl with a ribbon around her neck who has a crazy secret. I’m not necessarily upset about his hiring, really. He’s not a director who springs to mind as the kind of visionary who can successfully translate not just the look, but the tone and the feel of the manga to the screen (Off the top of my head, my 3 choices would be Takashi Miike, Edgar Wright, and the Wachowskis) but the biggest deal is this paragraph, right here:
The original “Akira” was released in Japan in 1988, based on Katsuhiro Otomo’s graphic novel. The film, about a biker in a post-World War III Japan, has become a cult favorite.
Warners’ new version will be set in New York City, and will follow a biker who tries to rescue his friend from medical experiments.
That last sentence? That sentence means we’re using the same goddamn script that Allen Hughes walked away from, the one where EVERYONE IN AKIRA IS WHITE. Meaning all these dudes in the picture below are back in play to headline the adaptation of a work that is largely about how Japan dealt with being the only country in the world to have nuclear weapons dropped on it.
Now, I’m not gonna step on the same (obvious) points I’ve made in previous blog posts about how there’s no reason this even needs to be live-action, much less a single 2 hour live action movie set in New York that takes all the mistakes Otomo made in his own 1988 adaptation and compounds them even further with rampant racebent bullshittery.
This is an attempt by Warner Brothers to tourniquet yet another self-inflicted gash before it becomes Superman Returns all over again. Which makes this stumbling fuckup even more frustrating. They think they’re learning, but they’re just running their head into a different section of a crumbling brick wall.
With Superman Returns, WB chased at least 4 different viable versions of that movie to the tune of somewhere around 80 million dollars without a single frame of film being exposed. That famously led to things like this getting leaked to the internet amidst giggles and bemused looks.
That wild-goose chase finally led to them selecting Bryan Singer, who then spent another 250 million dollars to make what I like to call “Emo-Man Lifts Successfully Heavier Things: The Pseudosequel,”
This Akira production? They’ve probably spent around 20-40 million already over about a decade (remember when Stephen Norrington was attached to this thing?) only to end up in an even more misguided place than Superman was, and the lesson they’ve learned isn’t “Maybe we should try to figure out why this thing works before we throw more money at it,” or even “We should try not to be a bunch of bleached assholes about this and start over because obviously we’re doing this wrong.”
It’s “Well, we’ve already dropped around 40 on this thing. Lets see if we can get out for around 120 and we can dump it in January.”
I’ve said it before: If you take Japan out of Akira, you’re not making Akira anymore. And if you’re not gonna make Akira? Why fucking bother?
I won’t.
Nothing new here. hollywood always messing up Manga/Japanese movies by “Americanizing” them. Dragonball Z is a good example of this.
To a lesser extend Avatar the last airbender. Hollywoods way of making sure they hit the lowest common denomintor.
Not sure why in this day and age Hollywood cannot have an asian leading man. Many popular independent films have proved that an asian lead actor can bring in the bacon as well as american lead actors.
New York is so played out! how about making it take place in Portland! it makes as much sense