Report: Surprising no one, "Akira" live action movie takes huge liberties - Sensationalist Headlines

Yep, and that's why the movie wasn't made. MGM wanted to set it in Washington D.C. and replace Dark Ones with some generic monsters. And as Glukhovsky pointed out to them, the setting swap won't work because huge and important factions would no longer make sense, the Nazi and Communist factions no longer make sense. They'd have to rewrite everything, the protagonist, the plot, the factions, the beasts, and by the time they would finish it would not be Metro by a long shot. In the end MGM abandoned the whole thing and transferred the rights back to Glukhovsky.

I'd watch a Godfather like that. That would be a brutal movie.

That's actually a huge part of it. Particularly in the case of Hollywood producers. Remember the giant mechanical spider from Wild Wild West? Well, producer Jon Peters wanted that in a movie for like a decade. He wanted it in Tim Burton's Superman Lives, he wanted it in a fucking Sandman adaptation (Neil Gaiman, not the Spider-man villian), and so on - just so he could say he was the man that put a giant mechanical spider on screen.

But that's the thing I don't get, it's not easy. Movies are massive investments, they take years of work and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. How does it seem like a smart idea to make that kind of gamble hoping that branding alone will sell it? I feel like these movie producers look at the millions Ghost in the Shell lost and blame it on the movie just not being an attractive enough brand.

You CANT americanize Akira because a good deal of its core themes are intrinsically tied to the nuclear bomb's effects on the Japanese social consciousness.

What a cluster fuck!

Detatched old white men with too much money

I mean, they are kind of right. They themselves created the self-centered American audience that then they feel beholden to.

Whatsup with the american movie industry and taking an immense dump on shit that's actually interesting to make a quick buck

A lot of the most influential Japanese works have been shaped by the bombs, since Japan itself was radically changed by them. It makes it practically impossible to adapt any contemporary Japanese work into an American setting as the event which caused them to stop warring can only be viewed from diametrically opposed sides. For America it was a calculated necessary evil to end the war, for Japan it was the sudden and definitive end to their empire. You can't just ignore that, and if you do you'll end up with something that can't work.

can't believe we get a pretty accurate adaptation of alita only to then get a westernized akira. what a weird time to be alive.

Just white actors? Not in this decade, chief. Remember that live-action adaptation of Death Note? https://cdn1.thr.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/scale_crop_768_433/2017/08/dn_unit_01186_r_crop_-_h_2017_0.jpg

If it was filthy rich, i would have just funded an anime trilogy of films more accurate to the source material.

That movie was really good until the ending. God, what a waste.

Americanize the location, but their names are still fucking Kaneda and Tetsuo. If you're going to dump ass on the source material, at least be consistent with what you're dumping ass over. Fuck them especially for removing Neo-Tokyo. Neo-Tokyo is one of the single greatest settings in fiction. Not sci-fi or manga or anime, FICTION. A huge part of what Akira so iconic is how vividly the futuristic dystopia of the city is portrayed, giving it this grittiness and ugliness that nothing else has been able to compare to.

The Godfather: Gopnik edition when?

Akira is so tied to Japan and horrors of war there's, to animation, no way Americans today can possibly adapt it. Akira's plot is stupid and nonsensical. Akira as a piece of art is breathtaking, on par with 2001 Space Odyssey. I'm so tired with Hollywood cynically buying titles of beloved properties just and only to drags butts to the seats.

To be fair, half of our country watches a news station that has stories like “Is The LEGO Movie anticapitalist? The villain is Lord Business! What’s wrong with businesses, LEGO? You’re a business!” “This is just the LGBT communist propaganda sneaking into our wonderful CAPITALIST children’s toys.”

Looks like Hollywood has moved on from rebooting shit that didn't need to be rebooted to taking Japanese properties and stripping everything but the name and the basic premise At least when Edge of Tomorrow did it they treated it like it could stand on its own instead of calling it All You Need Is Kill, but maybe it didn't do well enough and that's why we now have Your Name But With Native Americans

Honestly yeah, but it wouldn't really be Godfather

Akiras plot is only stupid and nonsensical if your only exposure to Akira is the movie Tetsuo has his aide bring him a harem of underage girls. Taking them back into his parlor, he has them stripped naked and forces them to partake of his party favors, the pills that he uses to increase his psionic abilities. One of the girls, Kaori, pretends to swallow the pill, but doesn't actually take it. After a bout of love-making, Tetsuo experiences dreamlike visions of him when he was little more than a wannabe biker with his old pal Kaneda. Kaneda's face appears to haunt him. The movie is only ~5% of Akiras storyline, all the quick character cameos like the 'cult leader' you see, end up getting pages upon pages of character development, as opposed to 2 minutes of unexplained screen time. Everyone should check out the illustrated version of the manga if they haven't already, it owns.

So what happened with Taika Waititi having interest in this film? Was he just saying he wanted to do it but was never brought on?

When will the pain stop https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/206566/7ab1c6c6-2b6f-40bb-af5d-a389d858ed4d/latest.jpg Akira was set in the far future year of 2019, lol

A lot of it has to do with compartmentalization That is, when we look at the finished product, it looks like there was one, big decision made to turn the movie into that. In reality, it's a lot of small ones. You have several departments (props, costumes, casting, production and more) talking to each other, all of them have different levels of say in the project https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/172/573383cd-df8d-4b90-9ce6-e40337293789/image.png Imagine this: So the producers, or someone else down the line, ask for your concept art of Piccolo to have more muted colors. Bright green is ridiculous, they say, and you go "alright, that's not too big a compromise, we can definitely still make something that looks like Piccolo here" Then your concept art is handed off to other people. The makeup team attempts to make something very manga like, but it turns out this process takes 12 hours, or, what they've been able to come up with looks plain weird. Either way, for the sake of the schedule, for the sake of the actor, and for the sake of their jobs, they ask/are asked to have this changed. Your Piccolo now looks less like the source material, but isn't much of a departure from what you had in the previous step. Then you have the costume people. It turns out those baggy pants make Piccolo's genie shoes look very tiny in live action (maybe they don't, really, but one producer thinks they do). Maybe the shoes look fine, but are genuinely painful to wear while shooting for a whole day. Whatever the reason, the people that make the costumes would be out of time and over budget if they tried to retool this, seeing as they have to deal with every other character, as well. They give him boots, which is best for everyone at the time, and isn't very different from what came before it. Then the lighting, acting, directing, they all end up changing things for one reason or another. Maybe the actor tried doing a pitch-perfect impersonation, but was told by the director that this wasn't working. Maybe they did several takes for each scene [they probably wouldn't have for a movie of this caliber, lol], one with the Piccolo voice, and one with a normal one, but the editors were told, 3 months from when all those other decisions were made, when everyone else is done with the film, to use only the takes with the regular voice. And this whole thing varies. Sometimes the person at the top holds it all together, sometimes they try but fail. Sometimes they're the ones to mess it up, not having a vision for the movie that makes much sense. Sometimes it has to do with people trying too hard to insert their own flair into their work, but it could also be that everyone's trying their very best, and the only failures are communication, time, funds. It doesn't help that it takes longer for a person to establish themselves in the industry, than it takes for a property to become film-worthy. James Wong, the director, was 50, while Stephen Chow, producer, was 49 - while both described themselves as Dragon ball fans, who knows what their visions of it were like? Probably very different from the target audience of ~12 year olds. Who knows if Brett Rattner, abysmal filmmaker, second credited producer (and alleged horrible person), didn't have the studio directives to override Wong and Chow? Either way it's a long and arduous process, with tons of tiny decisions. And it's a job, where not everyone's that eager to tell others how to do theirs, even if they see what the problems are. This doesn't justify anything, of course, but it does help explain the complex, multi-layered, and often times stupid thing that is filmmaking https://youtu.be/Wo2KB1dEDdk

That do this because your average American consumer is so stupid and intolerant of new ideas that if they didn't, people wouldn't watch it. Consider how terrifying that is

This is the assumption that too many film producers have convinced themselves of. Despite evidence to the contrary.

The ending of the manga wasn't written while the film was in production iirc. Even if it was, films need more brevity than novels do, as you say. If anime/manga has a cultural touchstone it has to be Akira, it has an astonishing amount of influence on people.

Yea honestly this sounds cynical but look at how much Blade Runner 2049 made in the US. One of the scifi movie of the decade, completely trashed at the US box office when absolute garbage makes bank. I cant be not cynical after that, sometimes it comes down to most people have bad taste and that limits the financial viability of bold original high budget movies.

Fitting but we are living in a dystopian future too except its the fucking lame version

I guess one thing it has going for it is it's being based more on the manga than the film, but so much of the manga is tied specifically to Japan's post WWII struggles that setting it in the US completely ruins that.