George Miller Turned Down Akira For WB

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller passed on the opportunity to direct Warner Brothers' [...]

Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller passed on the opportunity to direct Warner Brothers' long-gestating live-action adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.

"There was talk of it [the live action Akira]," Miller told Yahoo. "But I've got so many things on my dance card, I don't have the time to do everything."

After spending 8 months filming Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller has said he'd like his next project to be smaller. Plus, he already has 2 additional Mad Max scripts waiting and ready to go.

Then an interesting exchange took place when Yahoo mentioned that Miller had previously said Fury Road was influenced by Akira. "Actually, I didn't [say Akira was an influence on Fury Road], I don't know where that came from," he explained. "I'm a huge fan of anime and the precision of that and to some degree Manga, even though I don't read Japanese, but just the aesthetic of it. So Akira might have been one of the many movies but it certainly wasn't one that directly influenced Mad Max."

As of right now, last real bit of news surrounding WB's Akira was that Marco J. Ramirez, co-showrunner for the second season of Netflix's Daredevil, is writing the latest script.

Akira (1988) - Neo-Tokyo, 2019. The city is well on the way to rebuilding after World War III. The central characters, Kaneda and Tetsuo, two high school drop-outs, are members of a joy-riding motorcycle gang. In the opening scene, Kaneda and Tetsuo stumble upon a secret government project to develop telekinetic humans, apparently for use as weapons. Tetsuo learns of the existence of his 'peer' Akira, the project's most powerful subject, and determines to challenge him...

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