Warner Bros Now Casting ‘AKIRA’

A few years back Warner Bros. purchased the rights to make Katsuhiro Otomo’s AKIRA a live-action film. Now after receiving a slamming script from Steve Kloves the company wants to push ahead with the production and get this film in the can. The studio sent out scripts to numerous actors in the hopes of finding the perfect people to take on the roles of Tetsuo and Kaneda. Several big names like Justin Timberlake, James Franco, and Brad Pitt were tossed into the mix, but Warner Bros. is also extending feelers to younger actors like Robert Pattinson and Zac Efron.

Bringing this film to the big screen is no small undertaking. The Hughes brothers will take the directing reigns and AKIRA will be split up into two films and each one will cover three of the books by Katsuhiro Otomo. To this day the 1988 anime AKIRA is still considered a masterpiece, and for a lot of people, myself included, the film was their first introduction to the world of anime. AKIRA is real anime and not the watered down, and Americanized garbage that gets shown at six o’clock on Sunday mornings. Hopefully these films will carry a spark of that same magic.

Synopsis:
“Akira is set in the post-apocalypse Neo-Tokyo of 2019, a vast metropolis built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by an apocalyptic blast of unknown power that triggered World War III. The lives of two streetwise teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, change forever when dormant paranormal abilities begin to waken in Tetsuo, who becomes a target for a shadowy government operation, a group who will stop at nothing to prevent another catastrophe like that which leveled Tokyo. And at the core of their motivation is a raw, all-consuming fear: a fear of someone — or something — of unthinkably monstrous power known only as… Akira. And Akira is about to rise! [Amazon]”

Source: http://www.collider.com