Well, then. This development of this infamous AKIRA remake has enough twists, turns, shocks and surprises to be a story in its own right. After comments from comic artist and conceptual designer Chris Weston made it seem like the lights had been turned out for this project, Variety’s reported that has Jaume Collet-Serra now signed on to captain this ship. Even if you lunatics aren’t familiar with his name, you’ll likely have heard of the horror and suspense flicks he’s directed like ORPHAN and UNKNOWN.
There’s not much else to go on except for the tidbit that the budget’s been scaled back to $90 million. Although, maaaaaaaaaaybe that’s only half of an overall $180 mil. budget if the plan still persists for this story to be executed as a two-parter. All I can really say is that somebody at the studio must have tremendous faith in this story to keep it going despite these years of personnel changes and conceptual re-evaluations. At this point, I’m starting to wonder if the conclusion of DARK CITY going to forever remain the closet thing we’ll ever see to (something akin to) AKIRA in live action.
Tom Pinchuk’s the writer of HYBRID BASTARDS! & UNIMAGINABLE. Order them on Amazon here & here. Follow him on Twitter: @tompinchuk
While i'm not as against adapting things to other mediums as everyone else seems to be, the loss of everyone with talent and skill from the production is a bummer. The budget doesn't seem all that big a deal to me though. I think stuff like Transformers being $200 million has convinced people that $90M is a shoe string two college students with a Flip budget or something.
