Akira gets the greenlight from Warner Bros, Garrett Hedlund the frontrunner for one of the two leads

Variety is reporting today that the new Americanized iteration of Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk manga has officially been given the greenlight by Warner Bros. The film, with a $90 million budget in tow, will be directed by Jaume Collet-Sera (UNKNOWN, ORPHAN). This comes after a long and troubled development cycle, which most recently included losing director Albert Hughes (THE BOOK OF ELI, MENACE II SOCIETY) over so-called “creative differences”. When Collet-Sera came aboard, many of you felt it to be a bland and boring choice. And frankly, you’re not wrong.

But how’s this for more boring? Variety says that the frontrunner to have emerged for one of the film’s two leads is TRON: LEGACY’s Garrett Hedlund. My apologies if you like him. But if not, take comfort in the fact that nothing is official at this point (though an offer is said to be coming possibly soon).

Set in “New Manhattan”, AKIRA follows “the leader of a biker gang who must save his friend, discovered with potentially destructive psychokinetic abilities, from government medical experiments.”