As Anthony Carboni mentioned in a tweet (
https://twitter.com/acarboni/status/155148902088179713 ): "They halted the live action Akira. Apparently there aren't enough white people in the world to realize the director's vision."
I don't think that this is the whole story. Even though the latest leaked synopsis is short on detail, it essentially paints a series of script writers and rewriters struggling to adapt a typically, deeply Japanese movie of its time (the 80s) into modern New York. This explains a bit why everybody was shocked at the all-white crew of actors.
But there's something deeper than that that would explain the "malaise". At the core of the character development, it's a story about students that are always repressed or simply left on their own by their authority figures, making the whole thing a "us against them". As a result, they form their own bike gangs, often skip school, and some even take drugs. This is why the teenage Tetsuo, having taken drugs before as an act of rebellion, is quite taken aback when the ultimate authority figure (the military general) gives him some drugs to control his telekinesis powers. The movie quickly turns into a metaphor about power struggle of a repressed younger generation and the need of wisdom in yourself in controlling such powers.
Actually, even as a movie that's quite shorter than the manga, Akira succeeds in being more than just a sequence of over-the-top action sequences and manages to intertwine character development and themes about the social struggle of teenagers in Japan in the 80s. Beyond adapting that into a confusing action movie, having a major American studio respect its themes of youth rebellion against authority and drug use is unthinkable. And without those themes, the American Akira would have only been a massively expensive mess.