Geek Armageddon Narrowly Avoided
Happy Monday, Folks /
TK
Trade News | June 15, 2009 | Comments (12)
Rejoice, my fellow geeks, because for once, things are going your way. Not because of a movie being made or a casting being spot-on. Just the opposite, in fact. The good news of this week is that the live action version of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime magnum opus, is “dead as a doornail.”
And I couldn’t be happier. Not only is Akira near-unfilmable as a live-action film, but it’s damn near perfect in its current incarnation. Worse still would have been the inevitable changes that we would have had to deal with. Some of those had already been released — the film would have taken place in “New Manhattan” instead of Neo Tokyo, for one thing.
It’s a rare case of either common sense or learning from history. Akira is far too cerebral a film, and it’s Americanized adaptation would inevitably have been pigeonholed as another “superhero movie,” which would be a tragic misnomer. It also would likely have bombed at the box office, since the audience for the original is so narrow, and my suspicion is that the suits would have had zero idea how to market it. Of course, the other problem is that there’s a high likelihood it simply would have sucked rancid donkey balls.
Happy Monday, geeks. Happy friggin’ Monday.
Comments
Posted by: twig at June 15, 2009 10:39 AM
It's sad when the high point of geek victory is that some Hollywood studio doesn't make a horrible, horrible mistake.
I mean, it's still a victory. But damn.