The reception of this news is lukewarm because of his recent projects.
Hollywood adaptation of Akira has been in production hell since 2002, but Waititi's involvement promises some hopeful changes.
A few years ago, right after Alita: Battle Angel by Robert Rodriguez was released, Taika Waititi said that he also wanted to make a live-action version of his beloved anime — Akira. For quite some time we didn't hear anything from him about this project, as he was busy with other things, but this year we learned that Waititi plans to work on Akira after finishing his episode of Star Wars — or maybe even instead of it.
The movie, as we suspected, was shelved when Waititi focused on Thor: Love & Thunder, but he kept working on the script. So the movie is in its earliest stages of development, which means that even if it gets green-lit, we'll see it in around five years at best.
Trust-building exercise
Waititi's enthusiasm, however, is well-known, and it seems he's going to do everything in his power to bring this project to life. There's a lot of talk about how Waititi built his reputation and steady income on huge Hollywood movies specifically to be able to create passion projects, and that makes people believe in his vision.
Some are pretty wary after the lukewarm reception and production of Thor: Love & Thunder: the movie wasn't as exciting as Waititi's Marvel directorial debut, Thor: Ragnarok, and left a lot of viewers wanting more. The number of sudden revisions and general lack of proper management, combined with Waititi's comments about VFX artists' work on the movie, lessened people's enthusiasm. But after Thor: Love & Thunder Waititi released a low-budget biographical comedy Next Goal Wins that was very warmly welcomed both by critics and viewers.
Studio is untrustworthy
Another source of doubt is the fact that the project is being created for Warner Bros. This studio is known for its last-minute revisions and movies that tend to fall into production hell — and the latter is exactly what happened to Akira, since Warner Bros. held the rights for the movie adaptation since 2002. The project has changed at least five directors and ten writers. The majority of the troubles that followed the production were similar to the ones we saw in other Hollywood adaptations: the whitewashing of Asian characters and cultural differences, as a huge part of Akira's story is deeply connected to Japan's role in World War II. The Westernization of the story in early attempts changed it too much, so the project was abandoned for an indefinite amount of time.
In 2017, Waititi said that he was discussing his position as the director and that he was adamant about casting Asian-American teenagers to play the characters. More than that, he promised to adapt the original six-volume manga and not the movie, which omitted a lot of events. Considering that modern movies' runtime is quite huge in comparison to the original Akira anime, we can expect a more truthful story development with fewer pacing issues.
The reception of this news is lukewarm because of his recent projects.
Hollywood adaptation of Akira has been in production hell since 2002, but Waititi's involvement promises some hopeful changes.
A few years ago, right after Alita: Battle Angel by Robert Rodriguez was released, Taika Waititi said that he also wanted to make a live-action version of his beloved anime — Akira. For quite some time we didn't hear anything from him about this project, as he was busy with other things, but this year we learned that Waititi plans to work on Akira after finishing his episode of Star Wars — or maybe even instead of it.
The movie, as we suspected, was shelved when Waititi focused on Thor: Love & Thunder, but he kept working on the script. So the movie is in its earliest stages of development, which means that even if it gets green-lit, we'll see it in around five years at best.
Trust-building exercise
Waititi's enthusiasm, however, is well-known, and it seems he's going to do everything in his power to bring this project to life. There's a lot of talk about how Waititi built his reputation and steady income on huge Hollywood movies specifically to be able to create passion projects, and that makes people believe in his vision.
Some are pretty wary after the lukewarm reception and production of Thor: Love & Thunder: the movie wasn't as exciting as Waititi's Marvel directorial debut, Thor: Ragnarok, and left a lot of viewers wanting more. The number of sudden revisions and general lack of proper management, combined with Waititi's comments about VFX artists' work on the movie, lessened people's enthusiasm. But after Thor: Love & Thunder Waititi released a low-budget biographical comedy Next Goal Wins that was very warmly welcomed both by critics and viewers.
Studio is untrustworthy
Another source of doubt is the fact that the project is being created for Warner Bros. This studio is known for its last-minute revisions and movies that tend to fall into production hell — and the latter is exactly what happened to Akira, since Warner Bros. held the rights for the movie adaptation since 2002. The project has changed at least five directors and ten writers. The majority of the troubles that followed the production were similar to the ones we saw in other Hollywood adaptations: the whitewashing of Asian characters and cultural differences, as a huge part of Akira's story is deeply connected to Japan's role in World War II. The Westernization of the story in early attempts changed it too much, so the project was abandoned for an indefinite amount of time.
In 2017, Waititi said that he was discussing his position as the director and that he was adamant about casting Asian-American teenagers to play the characters. More than that, he promised to adapt the original six-volume manga and not the movie, which omitted a lot of events. Considering that modern movies' runtime is quite huge in comparison to the original Akira anime, we can expect a more truthful story development with fewer pacing issues.
