Ruairi Robinson will be making his directorial debut with Akira, while Gary Whitta is writing a script for the movie. Warner Brothers originally had the rights to the Akira movie, but they had to re acquire them from Kodansha after the bidding from the movie rights reached the 7 digit numbers. My math ain’t that great but isn’t 6 number already in the millions. Andrew Lazar, DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson will produce. No announcement has been made regarding the cast for the Akira movie.
I don’t really know Ruairi Robinson since this is his first ever movie he will be directing, but this could be a bit of a risk to use him to direct since it will be his very first movie as a director, but with the right budget, cast and material to work with the potential for a great movie could be there.
There is also a lot of strong indicating that DiCaprio will also star in the lead role as Kaneda. I know a lot of people still see DiCaprio as nothing more than a pretty boy actor, but you have to give it to the man he does know how to act. There is also rumors that that Joseph Gordon Levitt from brick, The Lookout fame will play the role of Tetsuo in the Akira movie.
This will be an interesting experiment but I hope doing live action Anime shows doesn’t become too big in Hollywood. I guess it will all depend on how well the Dragon Ball movie does, although my hopes for that isn’t very high.
http://larcho.wordpress.com/2008/04/21/ ... ion-akira/
