After his success with Thor: Ragnarok, it seemed like director Taika Waititi was going to rescue the long-brewing Akira live-action movie. The film was set to be his next project after Jojo Rabbit, but then Marvel Studios got involved again. When it was announced he would return to helm Thor: Love and Thunder, Akira was pushed back yet again.
Now, however, there's another wrinkle: Star Wars.Disney is reportedly eyeing Waititi for a film project set in the galaxy far, far away. While nothing has been confirmed, it certainly raises the possibility that Akira could be delayed once more.
Not that development hell is anything new to Akira. Warner Bros. paid millions for the rights to Katsuhiro Otomo's acclaimed cyberpunk manga in 2002, and has been trying without success to produce an adaptation ever since. Many directors have been attached over the years -- Stephen Norrington, Ruairi Robinson, Allen and Albert Hughes, and Jaume Collet-Serra were on board at various points, with other filmmakers, such as George Miller, Justin Lin and Jordan Peele, being offered, but ultimately turning down, the role.
It's been as much of a revolving door on the screenwriting side, too. James Robinson, Gary Whitta, Mark Fergus, Hawk Otby, Steve Kloves, Dante Harper, Marco Ramirez, and finally Michael Golamco have all been credited as writer for the screenplay at some point. This isn't even going into all the actors who have been attached to the project over the years. Suffice it to say, this has been an unusually troubled production -- maybe not quite The Man Who Killed Don Quixote levels of trouble, but it's approaching it.
Part of the problem is that Akira is such a specifically Japanese story that it's hard to do it for an American audience without having to make substantial changes. It's not even just the potential issues of whitewashing, which the producers have struggled greatly with. The original Akira was such a hit because American audiences at the time weren't used to how anime looked. Trying to bring that feeling back in live-action after more than three decades of anime becoming much more familiar to American audiences is a really hard problem to solve. You can't just recreate that novel experience so easily.
Even harder is the fact that the story takes a lot of influence from Japanese involvement in World War II, both in what the Japanese military did and being the victims of the atomic bombings. While Americans may know some of those reference points, it's not as close to home. There were attempts to build the story around something more familiar to Americans, such as the September 11th attack, but that started to turn it into a very different story. As we heard more about it, it seemed like Taika Waititi had cracked how to make it work and avoid those issues. He was saying as recently as the JoJo Rabbit press junket that they were on track to release the movie in 2023.
If Taika Waititi does sign on to direct a Star Wars movie, this throws Akira up in the air again. He promised that he would do Akira after Thor: Love and Thunder is finished, but if anything would get bumped here, it's Akira. Disney wants to keep Waititi "in the family" (JoJo Rabbit was Fox Searchlight, now part of Disney, and he worked on the original story for Moana), and Disney is not about to push back or put the next Thor movie in jeopardy, even for Star Wars. While Warner Bros. wants to make Akira, it's doubtful it would offer Waititi more than Disney.
Given the release dates for Star Wars movies we know about, he would probably direct the one set to come out in 2024. There is one coming out sooner, Christmas 2022, but Thor: Love and Thunder comes out November 2021, and that movie won't come together in a year. If he directs the 2024 Star Wars movie, then Akira would have to fit in between there, which might be possible but could really stretch how many big movies one director can juggle at the same time. That also assumes that everything goes smoothly transitioning from working on Love and Thunder to Akira and then to Star Wars, and the production of Akira has been anything but smooth. If the schedule starts to slip again, something has to give.
Maybe that something is the director. Maybe Waititi isn't going to direct Akira, but that's even worse news. Sure, Akira has gone through a lot of directors already, but that isn't a good sign. You can't really just slot in a new director and keep everything moving forward, so there would be more script rewrites, story reworking and making sure the director matches the direction of the movie. It's hard to tell if things would go more smoothly if production paused again to find a new director, or wait nearly four years for the current one to be free of big commitments again.
Whether or not Taika Waititi will direct a Star Wars movie is up in the air, especially since the director has been quite negative on the idea in the past. With his success working on The Mandalorian and Disney taking some time off from Star Wars after The Rise of Skywalker, things may have changed. None of it, though, sounds like good news for Akira.
Directed by Taika Waititi, Akira is scheduled to be released in 2023 and is expected to start filming in California. There remains no official casting or any other details.