Cyberpunk has never really left popular culture, but most of its biggest reference points are now decades old. Blade Runner arrived in 1982, William Gibson’s Neuromancer followed in 1984, and Japanese animation gave the genre one of its most important screen landmarks near the end of that same decade. Now that landmark is returning to North American theaters.
Sony Pictures Entertainment and Crunchyroll are bringing Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira back to U.S. and Canadian theaters in 4K and IMAX, as Collider notes. Screenings will feature Dolby TrueHD sound, and both Japanese-subtitled and English-dubbed versions will be expected to be available. Akira started as Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga, which ran from 1982 to 1990 in Kodansha’s Young Magazine. Interestingly, the film came out in 1988, before the manga had ended, with Otomo directing his own material for the screen.
Akira drops viewers into Neo-Tokyo years after a catastrophe has remade the world, with biker gangs pushing the city toward another chaotic point. What still makes Akira stand out is how adult and uncompromising it felt, especially for Western audiences used to seeing animation treated as children’s entertainment.
There were adult animated films before Akira, of course, but the mainstream U.S. idea of animation was still heavily shaped by children’s television, Disney features, and toy-driven cartoons. Perhaps that is why Akira became a reference point that other filmmakers kept circling. Hollywood never quite replicated its impact, but pieces of it are easy to recognize later. You can feel that in The Matrix’s anime-shaped action, Chronicle and Looper’s fear of young psychic power, and even Stranger Things, where the lab, the gifted child, and the cover-up all feel like familiar parts of the same old machine. That influence has been unusually visible outside film, too. Kanye West’s “Stronger” video made its debt to Akira hard to miss, especially in its hospital imagery and motorcycle fixation.
With all that said, it explains why Hollywood kept trying, and failing, to make a live-action Akira. Warner Bros. spent more than two decades developing the remake, with the project coming closest when Taika Waititi’s version received a May 21, 2021 release date. It never made that date, and the rights eventually reverted to Kodansha in 2025.
The live-action version is, for now, no longer Warner Bros.’ problem, while the animated film is about to remind audiences why that version was always going to be hard to justify in the first place. Akira returns to theaters on Sep. 4 in a new HDR version based on its 35mm film master. Alongside the excitement around the re-release, creator Otomo is reportedly involved in launching a new anime studio, OVAL GEAR, to carry his visual approach forward, with a new project already in the works.
