The live-action version of Akira may actually be happening. After Warner Bros. secured a co-financer for the $230 million pricetag (Legendary Pictures, who just recently backed out of the deal), and Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves turned in a rewrite of the script that had everyone eager to get going, producers began searching for their cast. Directors the Hughes brothers have been searching for an A-lister with global appeal to star in the flick (you don’t gamble that amount of money without ensuring that you’re gonna rake in serious international revenue), but for a while it seemed like they were searching in vain.
Now, Vulture reports that Keanu Reeves is in very early talks to take on the starring role in the film. Based upon the manga and the 1988 anime adaptation, Akira centers on teenager Shōtarō Kaneda and his quest to stop his friend Tetsuo from destroying Neo-Tokyo. Hit the jump for more on the project.
[Update: Heat Vision reports that Reeves is in talks for the role of Kaneda, the gang leader.]
Apparently both Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling passed on the film, opening it up to Reeves. However, nothing’s official yet and these talks are very early, so this isn’t necessarily confirmation that Reeves is starring in the flick, but it appears he is definitely interested in the role.
With Legendary recently pulling out of their co-financing deal with Warner Bros., don’t expect production to move ahead without a new partner. As we just saw with Universal and their Dark Tower adaptation, studios are very wary about gambling a giant sum of money on a genre flick. If they can secure a star, especially someone like Reeves who does well overseas, they should have an easier time finding another studio to help them shoulder the production cost.
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The Hughes brothers (Albert and Allen) are partly Armenian. A lot of people don’t know that.
This might be good casting if it were 1988, since Reeves is in his 40s. I guess it’s not too much of a leap to say the story’s been drastically re-written if Reeves and Pitt have both be sought to star (I’m assuming the role being discussed is Kaneda).
What’s sillier: the casting of non-Asians as Asian characters or middle-aged men as teenagers?
It’s a tossup because both ideas are awful.
It’s one thing to cast people in their 20s as teens, but 47? I don’t care what kind of makeup they use, a 47-year-old guy won’t look like a teenager.
Would they go the CGI route? Why not just get a youngish Asian-American person to play Kaneda, and then they don’t have to worry about all the time and money spent on CGI makeup.
…but then if you did cast Asian characters you gotta ask why they’re speaking perfect english. I think its fair to say that from there, you’d either have to make this a japanese movie with subs or just set it in america, the latter of which I believe they are doing. What’s wrong with that?
“…but then if you did cast Asian characters you gotta ask why they’re speaking perfect english.”
Steven that is an incredibly stupid comment.
There are such people known as “Asian Americans”.
@Jason
Oh really? I never knew! Having asian-americans doesn’t change what I’m getting at: if you set it in america you have a strange issue with how all of these important characters: a general, scientists, biker gangs, telephathic children, etc. all just happen to be asian american in what is supposed to be the melting pot of the world, and if you set it in japan you again have to wonder why these select characters all luckily happen to speak english in a non-english speaking country.
Ultimately the whole thing is a non-issue for at least some people… I’m just pointing out that, for the sake of being nitpicky and keeping these characters’ names intact, you’re going to get even more nitpicky complaints
“if you set it in america you have a strange issue with how all of these important characters: a general, scientists, biker gangs, telephathic children, etc. all just happen to be asian american in what is supposed to be the melting pot of the world,”
First of all, that’s not what you were getting at. You wrote:
“…but then if you did cast Asian characters you gotta ask why they’re speaking perfect english.”
You are saying that as if no Asians out there speak perfect English when in fact there are.
Second, this isn’t about all the other roles in the movie. If they set it in Manhattan of course you would have a melting pot of different ethnicities but this is a topic about the leads (Kaneda and Tetsuo). There is no reason why those leads cannot be played by Asian American actors.
Getting Reeves is obviously Warner’s way of having it both ways. They can get a white actor to still play the part but play up the fact that he’s “Asian” even though he has a very small percentage of him that is as a way of thinking it’s going to satisfy those that are calling out this casting for the obvious racism that it is.
Steven,
Have you never seen “Clash of the Titans” or “300″? Weren’t those 2 movies set in Greece where the natives actually speak Greek but the actors spoke English? The audience was smart enough to know that characters were speaking Greek from their perspective but English from ours.
Really, when you see a movie about Ancient Rome or Robin Hood or Zorro and everyone speaks English, don’t you just accept that the language there speaking isn’t really how the talked but is just English for the viewers?
Robin Hood did not modern English. His English would be pretty hard for modern English speakers to understand because it was before the conquest of England by the French. So, lots of words we take for granted didn’t exist in his English.
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I’m not gonna hate, because obviously somebody has a vision for this that makes some sort of sense, but… I just don’t get this.
He seems too old to me, but that’s just based on the picture of the character. I’ve never seen the show.
To fit into the original story, he is far too old and far too not-Japanese (though I think his father is Chinese and Hawaiian).
The main characters were teenage punks still going to high school in Neo Tokyo, one of the more gripping aspects of the story to me, anyway. They were completely unequipped to deal with the insanity around them much less their own gang politics.
So far there has been no indication that this new version will have anything to do with Japan, instead bringing it to Manhattan (right?). So this will be nothing like 47 Ronin which is placing Keanu in an all Japanese group as a half breed, story-wise.
What’s strange about the direction of this new movie, and makes it hard for me to get my head around it is this: If you strip out the Japanese culture and the teen biker gang turmoil you’ve stripped away a large portion of what made it more unique given its relatively tired sci-fi premise (person acquires great power quickly and threatens the world around self).
I’m not giving up hope on it yet, though. There are certainly some images and ideas that could be insane with modern effects and a live action setting. There’s also a heart to the characters that is universal enough, even though, in my opinion that part of the story would be better served with younger characters.
Well spoken, although I can’t really say I completely agree. The high school biker gang motif never really seemed to be more than just a way to set things up and neo tokyo didn’t really seem especially asian. I can’t really think of anything from the manga or the movie that ever really screamed to me “this has to be set in japan” or “these characters need to be kids” I get that you’re saying without these particular quirks you’d just have a generic sci-fi movie but I don’t really agree, I think there were plenty of other stuff in there to make it stand out.
I would certainly prefer younger characters (although not necessarily asian characters), but I don’t really see it as being a huge part of what makes Akira so appealing.
@Steven
Why change the location of a movie whose central theme is how fucked up it is to be Japanese?
I know that sounds disrespectful, but you have to admit that it is, indeed, a pretty fucked up thing to be Japanese. You’re confined to an isolated island for the vast majority of your cultural development – an island regularly beset by massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and typhoons – and when you eventually do emerge from your isolation, you become the only society to ever have nuclear weaponry deployed against them. Consider all of those factors, and then watch one of those tsunami videos; it’s easy to see why so many of their movies seem to think of cities as “those things that just go away sometimes.” Akira’s imagery relies heavily on this concept of civilization as an impermanent thing: Cities are fragile beings in the movie. They can, and frequently do, dissolve away into nothing right before the character’s eyes.
Akira takes place in Tokyo, decades after it’s been completely devastated and eventually rebuilt. The location wasn’t picked at random: That specific setting has great significance to the story, which revolves around the brutal, violently changing forms of its protagonist, Tetsuo. It’s a movie that explores what people are, what civilization brings with it, how progress changes us, and why that’s not always for the better. But it absolutely has to take place in Tokyo, Japan’s most iconic and permanent settlement, otherwise it means nothing. You can’t just do a line, close your eyes, spin a globe, stop it with your dick, and expect the story to work just fine wherever it lands, jaded Hollywood producers.
Why did you think a race change was even necessary?
Humanity is basically an international culture now. Japan isn’t a place so foreign to us that we can’t relate to them as human beings. It’s where our video games come from. It’s where Mario lives. It’s a plane ticket or a Skype call away. If you wanted to, you could do a quick Google search right now, and flip over to a webcam dedicated to watching them poop. That’s about as intimate as you can get with another society. We’re okay with Asians, Hollywood: They’re no longer a mysterious and inscrutable society that fills us with fear and wonder. We don’t think they feel rage with their feet, or hover when depressed or anything — we generally assume they have human emotions and human struggles just like everybody else. Chow Yun Fat had a career over here, remember? Lucy Liu? Hell, Ong Bak even did okay in American theaters, and that was a movie about a guy who did feel rage with his feet
So when you’re needlessly remaking movies in the future, remember that you can leave the setting and ethnicity of the characters alone, just so long as you change all of the dialogue to English, lest we spot a subtitle and are forced to flee the theater, slapping at the air like bees are chasing us. (SIDE NOTE: It might also be okay to tone down the weirdness at the end of Akira a little. In general, American audiences won’t really get the significance of the whole “teenager can’t handle evolving into a higher form and explodes into a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of cancerous throbbing organs” plot device. That’s just not a thing, here. We prefer our ambiguous supernatural endings to be people either becoming or disappearing into amorphous light beams, thanks.)
Why the age change?
The cardinal sin in this remake isn’t even the whitewashing, it’s the age change. Look at that cast list again: None of those people can play convincing teenagers, some of them even when they were actual teenagers. That’s probably why Pattinson was chosen for Twilight, actually: The fact that there’s something fundamentally off about the way he thinks human beings behave makes him a suitable choice for a vampire, or somebody with mild autism, and maybe even for my screenplay about a vampire with mild autism, but not for a teenager whose hormones and uncertainty cause him to regularly and sometimes literally explode with emotion.
Tetsuo and Kaneda are both fifteen years old in Akira, and they’re already members of a brutal motorcycle gang. That was, and to some extent still is, a real concern in Japan: They’re called Bosozoku gangs, and don’t let their hilarious cartoon vehicles fool you: In the late ’80s, violent teenage motorcycle gangs were right at the top of the media scare list in Japan, kind of like Muslims and terrorism are in the US today. The age of the characters is key in Akira, both in tying the main characters to the phobias of that culture, and also in dealing with all of the teenage emotional mainstays: Sex, hormones, and puberty. And Akira is very much about puberty. The finale of the movie has one of Tetsuo’s limbs engorging, growing out of control, and engulfing his girlfriend; it’s not exactly shooting for subtlety. But you can’t explore any of these issues with that live-action cast, because they are all, at the very least, fully grown men who have had more than enough time to get comfortable with boners.
Other then gutting the two central theme’s with the character of Kanenda,I can’t imagine why anyone would find this objectionable.
BOGUS
Well, seeing as how Keanu already conquered playing Buddha, as well as a bleach-blonde Englishman, I don’t think a Japanese teenager will be much of a stretch (he said tongue set firmly in cheek).
Ugh, it’s like when they wanted him to play Spike in the Cowboy beebop movie. He’s not even an A lister anymore, he hasn’t been for like 5 years. He’s too old, he can’t act and he’s just kind of boring to watch a lot of the time so please don’t put him in this movie. Why not put JGL(even though he’s not asian) and John Cho(even though he’s korean) in the movie. They fit the ages better, they’re talented plus they’ve both been featured in RECENT blockbuster films and could probably do Akira justice.
How come the authors of the Akira articles of this website are not mentioning the obvious white washing taking place with this production?
Nonwhites don’t get anywhere near close to the opportunities presented in Hollywood compared to white and when opportunities like this are presented it’s taken away from them. Asian Americans have it the worst with blatant white washing like The Last Airbender, 21, Dragonball Evolution, etc… and yet this website hasn’t brought any of this up.
There are plenty of Asian Americans they can look towards and even discover and they are not even considering them. And no Reeves doesn’t count because while he is partly Asian he doesn’t look it and that’s why he has been playing white roles all his life in Hollywood.
Why?
This is one if those cases in which it´s completely ACCEPTABLE for the writer of the article to provide his own thoughts. =]
Keanu Reeves can´t act, that is one of the very few instances where I can state such a claim as pure fact and not solely based on opinion.
Not to mention all the white-washing and age incompatibility, because hell, the story´s core is about immature teenage punks whose friendship is the only thing keeping them alive in the face of the Apocalypse.
What´s the difference between having an A list star attached? Look at Avatar for God´s sake. They just need a great actor and a script, the rest will sell itself.
And 230 million budget? Blomkamp spent 30 million and made District 9 which I thought was one of the best VFX I have ever seen that year and perhaps even more conving than Avatar.
No one who can’t pass for a young adult should be cast for those roles. Hollywood needs to get a grip, put it’s casting directors to work and create it’s next generation of movie stars. Goodness did anyone see the joke that was Ghost Rider? These actors are too old for these roles. On top of that, with Akira’s plot, this movie makes no sense outside of Japan. Just make it an epic big budget Japanese movie with Hollywood backing.
LOL, Brad Pitt passed on it and it ended up going to Keanu Reeves? That’s exactly what happened with The Matrix!
nonononno no i want leonardo vs joseph gordon lewitt alone for kaneda vs testuo , why ?? teenagers too but needs top two actors plays best the roles and characters too no reeves but he played in cowboy lives action ! if movie really complitace for akira , but akira not must be bad for best movies , but hard ! i knew kaneda and testuo , but about ken actor japan from japan he is best role for colonel and morgan actor too !
Wow! You all are really serious about this aren’t you?? Personally, I adore Keanu Reeves and would go see anything he’s in!
Ok, I’m jumpin in this, it’s time to stop reading.
Look, Keanau sells. He made Matrix. He will have a movie make mad paper. And if you have a budget out of the @$$ and you want to make sure the movie sells then the sad truth of racism says put a 45 year old white actor in the movie instead of a 14 year old japanese boy, and who cares if you shoot the movie on the moon, Keanau or any other white actor (like Brad Pitt etc.) will sell it
put enough make-up on him and he will play a 2 year old for you. Who will know the difference, or care, right??!!!!!
I was askin myself a similar question about Thandie Newton the other day, wondering if she gets more roles than other black actresses because she is a fair-skinned black actress and can almost pass for white. Don’t say it’s not true. Hollywood has a history of being racist.
My thoughts on Joaquin not getting the part of Kaneda in the Hughes bros movie Akira.For one thing there were several actors up for the part. One of the things I learned here in imdb just how competitive the movie business is. There was of course no guarantee any of them would be picked. I am not that upset JP not getting the role. There are quite a few Asian Americans and Asians in general who are up in arms only white actors were being considered. Since Akira was a Japanese film to me they are right. Plus many Akira fans of whatever ethnic background considered the film should only be of young 20 something actors. Most of the ones considered were at least in their 30s. Keanu Reeves is 47.
I think Phoenix is a much better actor than Reeves. OTOH that’s not saying much. Most are much better. The one thing Keanu has going for him imho is he looks somewhat Asian with his Polynesian background. JP is a significantly better actor. Heck he’s one of the best actors in film.
Get Justin Chatwin, and Advertise!!
This movie is gonna bomb like Neo-Tokyo.
Akira is going to be the movie of the decade! I can’t wait for it to come out.
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There are a lot of half asian cool actors out there. That’s who should be in it and the secondary parts should all be white.