In case you’ve never read any of the Akira manga or seen the landmark 1988 anime movie based on it, here’s a basic rundown of the plot. A powerful organization comes up with what it thinks it a great idea, but before its plan come to fruition, the whole thing blows up in their faces. Years later, though, it tries again, unleashing the danger of potentially even more disastrous results.

In the anime, the “powerful organization” is the military, and the “great idea” is cultivating weaponized psionic children. Some would say this parallels the real-world situation of another powerful organization, Hollywood movie studio Warner Brothers, and its own ambitions to turn Akira into a live-action film, which have faced nothing but roadblocks and angry backlashes from fans of the source material for more than 10 years now.

But just like Akira’s military, Warner Brothers seems convinced that it can still get all the variables just right, and new rumors suggest that the studio might be planning to make not one, but three Akira films, and that it’s courting one of Hollywood’s hottest filmmakers to help.

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