After months if not years of the Internet passionately wishing for it to just go away, the planned Akira remake at Warner Bros. finally seemed to do just that, when the studio halted production due to budget concerns. Still, a production stop isn't enough to kill a project even as wrong-headed as this one-- look what happened to The Lone Ranger-- and Warner Bros. is currently figuring out ways to save it, including bringing in new writers to reshape the script-- among them Jonah Nolan, according to Variety.
Christopher Nolan's brother and the co-writer of The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan is up for the job along with Michael Green, who has the far less impressive credit of being a co-writer on The Green Lantern. Still, either seems capable of saving the film, which is also in the process of looking for a new co-lead. Garrett Hedlund is still committed to play Kaneda, but they still need an actor to play his brother Tetsuo. Apparently Michael Pitt and Dane DeHaan were the final choices, but the studio had delayed a casting decision until after the holidays-- and will now delay it even further while a new script gets hammered out.
There's that famous Winston Churchill quote "If you're going through hell, keep going," and I have to imagine WB executives have it taped above their desks as they continue to try and save a project that, in essence, is an expensive adaptation of a Japanese manga that most Americans aren't familiar with, and the ones who do know it are passionately against the idea of an American remake. You almost have to admire a studio willing to work so hard to save something that seems so doomed-- but as they look toward big guns like Nolan and Green, maybe it indicates they know something about it that makes it worth saving after all.
