Following a super-success with horror Get Out ($214 million worldwide against a budget of $4.5 million), Warner Bros. reportedly "aggressively" courted sketch-comedy veteran Jordan Peele to direct their live-action adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo's classic manga/anime Akira. Now, a month after movie news buzzed over the possibility, Peele has explained why its not happening.
“I think [I could do it] if the story justifies it,” Peele told Blumhouse.com. “‘Akira’ is one of my favorite movies, and I think obviously the story justifies as big a budget as you can possibly dream of. But the real question for me is: Do I want to do pre-existing material, or do I want to do original content? At the end of the day, I want to do original stuff.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the director, who recently signed a two-year first-look deal with Universal Pictures. He is also signed deal to produce Lovecraft Country, a new for HBO drama.
Peele and his production company, Monkeypaw Productions, are joining J.J. Abrams’ “Bad Robot” and Warner Bros. Television to bring Matt Rush’s 2016 novel to the small screen.
No release date or casting was specified.
The critically acclaimed cult novelist makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.
Chicago, 1954. When his father Montrose goes missing, 22-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his Uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Mr. Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours.
At the manor, Atticus discovers his father in chains, held prisoner by a secret cabal named the Order of the Ancient Dawn—led by Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb—which has gathered to orchestrate a ritual that shockingly centers on Atticus. And his one hope of salvation may be the seed of his—and the whole Turner clan’s—destruction.
A chimerical blend of magic, power, hope, and freedom that stretches across time, touching diverse members of two black families, Lovecraft Country is a devastating kaleidoscopic portrait of racism—the terrifying specter that continues to haunt us today.
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Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.
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