Jaume Collet-Serra is in discussions to come back and direct Akira, the Warner Bros. project he stepped away from when the studio shut down production in early 2012.

Warner Bros. had been exploring other options at the helm, including Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, but, ultimately, the studio was still fond of Jaume Collet-Serra vision for this live-action adaptation of Katsuhiro Ôtomo's beloved manga. The director not only found an opening in his schedule, but also found a different way to approach the movie and trim the $90 million budget, which is why production was halted in the first place. It isn't known what the new budget figure is at this time.

Steve Kloves and Albert Torres had previously worked on the script, but it isn't known if the studio had brought in new writers. Garrett Hedlund had been attached to play Kaneda, the leader of a biker gang who tries to rescue his best friend Tetsuo from a mysterious supernatural experiment. Our report from 2012 indicated that Warner Bros. had been eyeing Dane DeHaan and Michael Pitt to play Tetsuo before the shutdown.

Jaume Collet-Serra is currently in pre-production on Run All Night, starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, and Ed Harris, with the plan to start production on Akira after that project, in the spring of 2014.