Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 9:50PM 'Akira' Remake Risks Cancellation
With tickets sales shrinking, many projects are being forced to either go low budget or vanish into oblivion. Gore Verbinski's version of The Lone Ranger nearly died for that reason, and similar things can be said of recent planned adaptations like Paradise Lost and Arthur and Lancelot. The studio has mandated that unless producers can reduce Akira's budget from it's original $90 million to between $60 million and $70 million, the project will be cancelled. The planned film was to be directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and star Garret Hedlund.
While it'd be easy to see these restrictions as the glass being half empty, I think this kind of crunch may turn out to be a good thing for Hollywood as a whole. Working on limited resources is something that breeds innovation and curbs laziness. When a filmmaker is having trouble making a Lone Ranger movie for less than $200 million, you know that there's a problem with resource control. Having lower budgets will force filmmakers to focus more on making their stories more compelling, and find new, unique ways of shooting what are usually the most expensive parts of a movie. Look at Drive: it manages to be more exciting and effective than Fast Five, and comes at almost 1/10th of the budget. What do you guys think? Is anyone going to be disappointed if Akira gets canned?
Reader Comments (1)
Yippe!!! I hope it gets canceled as I have stated before this is not Hollywood material....