Bad Idea Of The Day? Keanu Reeves Up For AKIRA?

If Keanu Reeves were still the age he was in the photo to the left then reports that he is currently in talks to take the role of Kaneda in the Albert Hughes directed remake of Akira might actually make sense. Only he's not. And it doesn't. Which is probably why it will actually happen.

Because, you see, nothing about this project has made sense from the beginning - a fact I suspect had a great deal to do with original director Ruairi Robinson walking away from it. But the lack of sense hasn't stopped backers from pushing ahead through multiple directors and a complete inability to attach cast. If you're going to make a live action adaptation of the manga and animated feature making the characters white - though leaving them with their Japanese names - and moving the action from Tokyo to New York makes no sense. Location matters in Akira. But that's what they're planning to do in the apparent hope - a badly misguided one, I believe - that they can leverage the name to draw a crowd.

Not that anybody making the decisions on this cares what I think but if you must do an Americanized Akira I think the first thing you need to do is jettison the Akira name. But the underlying rights, sure, and work the underlying themes but the only way to do this and have it work is to build a new story from the ground up, simply changing race and location is doomed to fail and fail badly. But, hey, what do I know? It looks like Keanu Reeves is going to be Kaneda regardless of what I think.