Director Taika Waititi showed off his directing chops with Thor: Ragnarok. Now, he’s returning to the Marvel franchise to direct Thor 4. Unfortunately, this also meant that to work on this new Marvel film, he had to postpone production on another big-name work he was also working on… Akira.

Thor 4’s production reportedly clashed with Akira’s, and the director had to choose to work on the latter. There were also reports of some creative conflicts between the director and the production. Sources claimed that Waititi was in favour of adapting Katsuhiro Otomo’s original manga rather than the anime, but some producers wanted to go another direction.

Waititi was in the process of interviewing young Japanese actors for the two lead roles in Akira when he decided to postpone the production in favour of working on Thor 4. Variety also reported that multiple sources close to Warner Bros. found this week’s announcement of Waititi directing “Thor 4” to be surprising, with one person adding they were caught off guard by Waititi’s decision to focus on the Marvel property as Akira was getting closer to production. There was no word on who the Japanese actors Waititi was interviewing prior to him postponing Akira.

It would have been interesting to see Waititi’s take on the film, as he was a big fan of creator Otomo. And from the looks of things, he was really trying to avoid the Whitewashing route and have two Japanese actors play the lead roles. For now, we would just have to wait for the production to resume and hope that it’s still Waititi handling the film.

source: Variety