I don’t know which God to thank on this one, but it turns out the production of Akira, which was to star Garrett Hedlund as Kaneda, has fallen to the side of the road and isn’t being actively pursued at the moment.

Garrett Hedlund

The reason for this, as so often, is all about the Benjamins. The film has been put on hold as Warner Bros. tries to figure out how much the movie is going to cost. Not too long ago, the same thing happened to The Lone Ranger, which is now seemingly being put back on track once they managed to cut the budget a little bit. They’re also taking a very close look at Arthur & Lancelot, as the cost of that may be spiraling out of control, too.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and the producers of the movie are now going to be spending a week or two working on the script, trying to figure out if there’s any way of lowering the cost down to somewhere in the vicinity of $60-70 million, far less than the just around $90 million budget that it’s scheduled to cost at the moment. Garrett Hedlund and Ken Watanabe are more or less booked already, with Kristen Stewart and Helena Bonham Carter both being in talks for other important roles.

If this is the way things are going, I think they should cancel this movie right away. $60 million dollars isn’t going to do this movie justice, and I don’t think they should risk doing something half-assed using the Akira name. Fortunately, we’ve learned that if the cost issues cannot be resolved, the project could end up being shelved entirely. I’m not even going to try to be sad if that happens.

(via /Film, The Mary Sue, Badass Digest)