Buried in a
Deadline article about Dante Harper signing on Fox 2000's
The Secret of the Temple, is an aside that Harper is also working on Warner Bros.' live-action adaptation of the Katsuhiro Otomo's manga and 1988 anime,
Akira. Yes, that on again, off again film just won't die. Back in January 2012, Warner Bros. shutdown production on the live-action Akira film, despite securing the talented cast of
Garret Hedlund,
Ken Watanabe,
Helena Bonham Carter and
Kristen Stewart. Now, it seems Serra is back at work and the studio has turned to Harper to craft the script for another tricky, Eastern intellectual property. Harper wrote the very first draft of
All You Need Is Kill, the spec script which resulted in a bidding war that saw the studio purchase the script for $3 million dollars (however, the numerous changes to the script after the purchase resulted in Harper not being credited for his work by the Writers Guild).
Reportedly, WB got cold feet about the $90 million dollar production budget for Akira and pulled the plug on the project. Since then, Serra has been working to make the feature film smaller and naturally, less costly. It's interesting that WB has now turned to Harper to work on the project, seeing that Edge of Tomorrow had an estimated budget of $178 million dollars. Has the global box office success ($351.5 million USD) of that film made WB less nervous about making a $100 million dollar Akira adaptation?
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