Normally over at Angry Zen Master, Wednesdays are pretty awesome. Every Wednesday is Gundam Wednesday when I dig up Gundam related news which, even when it's not Universal Century related, is always awesome. But there are just days when something so horrible occurs that I must put aside the awesome to comment on the suck. And fam, this bloody well sucks.

According to this tidbit of sparkly news sent along by Angry Zen Minions Kwadwo Amo-Mensah and Bijan Houshmandzadeh, Kristen "Queen of All That is Sparkley and Pale" Stewart has been offered the role of Kei in the Warner Bros live action version of Akira which is called Steve 'round these parts.

And now I see what they're doing here. It's not just about white washing the film. It's about building a new franchise that Warner Bros can hang on two hot young stars. They figure that if they've got this property, they might as well try to milk it for as much cashola as they can get. Pairing Kristen Stewart with Garrett Hedlund certainly makes for a sexy looking couple and a power geek couple. With Kristen, they bring in all the Twilight fans. With Garrett, they get some eye candy for the ladies and possibly any TRON fans still left out there. I imagine the trailers will have a few scenes of him strutting around shirtless while working on his bike.

Of course, their power couple has to be young, pretty, and Caucasian because Warner Bros thinks that's what audiences will pay for. After all, even though Failbender was harshly criticized by the Asian American community, fans of the series, and pretty much every movie critic who had the misfortune of seeing it, it was the 20th highest grossing film of 2010 raking in $318,941,258 world wide, a little over twice the amount it took to make the horrible stain. No matter how bad the press will be for Akira, Warner Bros is banking that it will do at least that well, if not better.

It's pretty insulting to the movie going public for Warner Bros to just assume that an Asian cast can't carry this film. I think Akira has a strong enough brand that it would be an absolute blockbuster with an Asian cast. Sadly, I don't think we'll get that chance. I doubt they will listen to fan outcry. They didn't with Failbender and look at how well that turned out for them. The numbers, unfortunately, are on their side.

Source: Twitch