Taika Waititi’s Live-Action ‘Akira’ Officially Dead, Warner Bros. Gives Films Rights Back To Original Manga Publisher Kodansha
After 20+ years in development Hell and the threat of its story being brought to life under the direction of Taika Waititi, Warner Bros.’ attempt at an live-action adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal manga Akira has officially been relegated to the trash bin of Hollywood.
Confirmation of the long-stalled project’s cancellation was brought to public attention courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, who on June 27th reported that not only had “Warner Bros. let go of the movie rights,” but that they had also subsequently reverted back to the Japanese publishing company Kodansha, whose Young Seinen manga magazine played host to Akira‘s original run.
Further, Kit claimed that “producers and talent are said to be lining up to attach themselves to the property in preparation to be presented to select studio and streamers,” but did not provide any details as to the possible identities of those involved in this supposed bidding war.
Plans for a live-action Hollywood adaptation of the classic Japanese sci-fi series – which was already flawed in its premise considering that Otomo’s story was explicitly inspired by Japan’s relationship to America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2 – were first drawn up in the early 90s when, in light of the 1988 animated classic’s popularity, Sony quickly moved to purchase its film rights.
However, after failing to actually do anything with said rights after roughly a decade, Sony eventually sold them to Warner Bros. in 2002.
Over the next decade-and-a-half, Akira would undergo several false starts under a bevy of different directors and writers, including The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) duo Stephen Norrington and James Robinson, House of Wax (and eventual Black Adam) director Jaume Collet-Serra, and Book of Eli screenwriter Garry Whitta.
Then, in 2017, word broke that, after years in limbo, Warner Bros. was actually putting their noses to the grindstone and making a pointed attempt at getting Akira off the ground – the first step of which involved them approaching the aforementioned Marvel director to take the wheel, a duty he would accept two years later.
Initially assigned a May 2021 release date, Waititi’s take on Otomo’s epic would soon suffer the same fate as its predecessors, with production stalling out thanks to the director commit to an ever growing list of other projects such as Thor: Love and Thunder and his all-but-officially-cancelled Star Wars outing.
The last update regarding the film’s production was ultimately given in November 2023 by Waititi himself.
Speaking with Inverse in promotion of his then-upcoming comedy Next Goal Wins, the divisive director not only assured his hosts that Akira was still in the works, but also that it would draw heavily from Otomo’s original manga.
“Obviously, I think people who loved the film, I want to make sure that they’ve also read the books because there’s a lot more in the books than there are in the film,” he told the outlet. “And some people are very protective over the film, which is not quite the same as the books. So we’re drawing a lot from the books.”
And the rest, as they would say, is history.
At current, it remains unclear what progress, if any, Waititi actually made on his version of Akira.
Regardless, the fact that it will never see the light of day is, at the end of the day, the second happy ending ever experienced by the residents of Neo-Tokyo.
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