Why do you have to keep breaking my heart, George Miller? You won't be directing MAN OF STEEL 2 and a sequel to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD more than likely won't be your next project, and now you tell Yahoo! Movies that you turned down helming Warner Bros.' planned live-action remake of AKIRA.
Miller says, "There was talk of it [the live action ‘Akira’], but I’ve got so many things on my dance card, I don’t have the time to do everything.” Obviously he can't do everything, but I know I'm not the only one who would have been down for a George Miller-directed AKIRA movie. Miller was also asked about the influence of the anime on MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.
Actually, I didn’t [say ‘Akira’ was an influence on ‘Fury Road’], I don’t know where that came from. 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’.
It's been rumored that Christopher Nolan might be involved with a film trilogy based on AKIRA, and there's speculation that the first installment could be his next directorial effort, which is scheduled to open in 2017.