What started as an idea over a beer, turned into an Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign. Then three days of filming followed by a year and a half of post-production with contributions from over forty artists in twelve different countries. It was released in 2017.

Hollywood has been trying to adapt the anime into live action for years. Taken from Wikipedia:

Since 2002, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to create a live-action remake of Akira as a seven-figure deal.[110][111] The live-action remake has undergone several failed attempts to produce it, with at least five different directors and ten different writers known to have been attached to it.[112][113] By 2017, director Taika Waititi was named as the film’s director for the live-action adaptation.[111] Warner Bros. had scheduled the film for release on May 21, 2021,[114] and filming was planned to start in California in July 2019.[115] However, Warner Bros. put the work on indefinite hold just prior to filming as Waititi had chosen to first direct Thor: Love and Thunder, the sequel to Thor: Ragnarok, which he had also directed.[116]