Jordan Peele In Talks To Direct ‘Akira’ For Warner Bros.
Jordan Peeleis the director of the moment, with his feature debutGet Outmaking waves critically and at the box office. And reportedly Warner Bros. has taken notice, courting theKey and Peeleco-creator to direct the embattled live-action adaptation ofAkira.
The Tracking Boardreports thatWarner Bros. is “moving aggressively to lock in” Peele forAkiraafter the success ofGet Out, and that the talks have been “encouraging.” The studio is also reportedly considering him to directThe Flash, which has been bleeding directors and has not found a new one sinceDopedirector Rick Famuyiwa left in October.
We reported a couple days ago that Warner Bros.had narrowed downthe director shortlist forAkiratoDaniel Espinosa(Life) andDavid Sandberg(Lights Out), but the reports aren’t clear on whether they’ve been dropped in favor of Peele, or whether it was just another cog in the rumor mill.
A Hollywood adaptation ofKatsuhiro Otomo’s groundbreaking1988animefilmhas been gestating for years, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached as producer andDaredevilseason 2Marco J. Ramirezreportedly penning the script. However, if Peele does sign on, it’s likely that the writer-director will be throwing out Ramirez’s script in favor of his own.
Warner Bros. has had plans to adaptAkirafor 15 years now, and nearly got the film off the ground in 2015 when Jaume Collet-Serra was tapped to direct and Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart were set to star, but creative and budgetary disagreements calledstudio pulled the plug.
With the controversy overwhitewashing that anime adaptationslikeGhost in the ShellandDeath Noteare eliciting now, would Peele — whose film tapped into the horrors of racial and cultural divides — be a good fit to navigate those murky waters? That is yet to be seen, though as an African-American director he doesn’t necessarily have the perspective to fully realize Asian-American experiences.Get Outtoo features an unassuming Asian man who sided with the white villains of the film, causing critics to point out that Peele hadperpetuated the idea of the “model minority,“and not as another community that has had their own share of oppression.
Peele’s directorial debutGet Outhas grossed more than $150 million on a reported budget of less than $5 million. Peele has not yet announced his next project, though he does have plans to direct awhole series of horror moviesabout “social demons.” The Tracking Board says that industry insiders say Peele is “ready to make the big-budget leap now,” and perhaps it will start withAkira.
