AKIRA’s live-action movie is being filmed
Katsuhiro Ohtomo(/大友克洋)’s sci-fi manga work “AKIRA” ,which has been quite popular worldwide for a few decades is at the moment being filmed as a “live-action movie version ” directed by Albert Hughes,who revealed the information in a telephone interview with Sankei Shinbun newspaper.
Albert and Allen Hughes, the twin directors are famous for some of their works, such as “From Hell” in 2002 and “the Book of Eli”, in which Denzel Washington stars, that was released on this Jun,19th and is showing at the moment.
AKIRA was filmed as an animation movie in 1988 whose total expenses summed up10 billion yen which was exorbitantly large in the standard for an anime movie in thosedays. And the work also was made to be a Famicon game in 1988 and PS game in 2002. The English manga version has become very popular in many countries and it was counter-imported to Japan.
Actually, this live-action movie filming project started in 2008 by Warner Bro. and Leonardo DiCaprio and expected to be released in summer in 2009. However, the project confronted with difficulties and upon the withdrawal of Ruairi Robinson who was supposed to be the director, it has begun to be thought to have been aborted.
Therefore, this new information of the resumption of the project must be welcome by a lot of AKIRA fans. Actually, Albert Hughes admits openly that he has been a “AKIRA freak” since he watched the anime version on laser disk in 1994, which would strengthen even hard-core fans’ expectations.