This year Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc played spoiler at the box office in their respective opening weekends (for the pocket-watching pundits among us), aweing moviegoers with the indescribable spark of magic animation. Anime has legs and is worth taking seriously as a new direction in cinema. Instead of addressing the 2D elephant of a lesson in the face, Hollywood said, “You know what the world really needs? More live-action anime films.”
According to an exclusive report from Deadline (on manga day, no less), Chloé Zhao, two-time Oscar winner behind Nomadland and Marvel’s Eternals, and Nicholas Gonda are teaming up with manga publisher Kodansha to head up a global studio called Kodansha Studios. Kodansha Studios, in turn, will exist for the express purpose of creating “premium, live action movies and television series” based on manga from Kodansha. To break this down in comic book movie terms, Kodansha is pulling a DC Studios by having Zhao and Gonda become their James Gunn and Peter Safran, guiding a new era of live-action anime films to a cinematic golden age. All the while, ensuring quality control, fostering healthy communication between international directors and manga creators, and developing solid scripts to bring their work to light. Hopefully, this will make the phrase “live-action anime film” less of a punchline than it has been over the past decade by utilizing Kodansha's manga catalog.
On paper, all of it sounds lovely, set against the haphazard wild west of random-ass live-action Hollywood adaptations that have seen the light of day and are looming menacingly over the horizon. But it's hard not to reflexively recoil when the Deadline piece namedrops “beloved manga” like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, and go, “God dammit, they’re gonna try doing it again.”
If there is any anime that could be considered Hollywood’s Moby Dick, it is Akira. Still, Kodansha Studios' mere existence essentially shows that, despite decades of false starts, studio reshuffles, and directorial ghosting—such as Warner Bros. shelving its version in the early 2000s, Jordan Peele politely declining, and Taika Waititi eventually withdrawing after years of development hell—Akira remains Hollywood’s promised-yet-elusive cash cow. With Kodansha Studios declaring its raison d’être as “premium live-action projects” (whatever that means), the thought that Akira might be their flagship effort feels like creative ambition and more like comedic arrogance. Should Akira prove to be the hill Kodansha Studios chose to die on, with the promise of guaranteed success because it’s popular, it’s hard not to stifle a laugh at the thought of it still attempting to see the light of day.
Tokyo Movie Shinsha’s 1988 Akira isn’t just a sci-fi anime film. It’s a miracle. A once-in-history convergence built on unheard-of budget, artistic labor, and technical muscle that animated over 160,000 cels and hand-painted matte backgrounds with the kind of obsessive artistry that no studio today could bankroll. The film isn’t just looked back on as lightning in a bottle but as a global flag-planting moment that declared anime as a cutting-edge art form worth taking seriously. Threatening to recapture it in live action isn’t just misguided—it verges on being creatively bankrupt. Undeterred by taste, history, hubris, or the sheer impossibility of doing it justice.
To quote YouTuber Cosmonaut Marcus in his succinctly titled video, Why I Hate Live-Action Anime Adaptations, “If you agree to adapt an anime into a live-action TV show or movie for Hollywood, then it means that you are already disrespecting the source material because in any great animated work, the beauty goes beyond the story or the characters, usually it's good because it's animated.”
While I’m a bit of a sicko who likes some live-action adaptations on their own merits, I agree with the latter half of Marcus’ take. Roughly 90 percent of why anime fans like the medium is the moving drawings. So reading this news in concert with Sony, through its fucked up homunculus merger with Kadokawa, also plans to ramp up its live-action efforts, despite their direct financial success from Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man, has me both fucking exasperated and side-eyeing Kodansha Studios playing follow the leader.
It’s not like Kodansha hasn’t had successes with already-made anime adaptations of its works; they're special because they're animated beautifully, filling in the gaps in manga panel artistry for anime fans without losing their artistry. And Kodansha’s library has proven to yield some of the most memorable anime films, like Weathering With You and A Silent Voice—anime films being the operative word.
Playing devil's advocate, there are exceptions to the rule of live action adaptations not being an entire crapshoot, but mainly as a reflection in fans' eyes in retrospect as cult classic hits with the likes of Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt-led Live Die Repeat and The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer (pound for pound the best live action anime film of all time). There’s even been pretty decent live-action ventures in the past, like Alita Battle Angel, and that Netflix adaptation of Last Samurai Standing looks promising. But for every success, there’s also monumental failures from leveraging Kodansha’s catalogue for live-action works—your Scarlett Johansson-led Ghost in the Shell.
Should Zhao and Gonda prove masterful international directors and original mangaka matchmakers, bringing underappreciated gems into the mainstream with “premium” live-action projects for works like all power to them. Works less likely to make folks reflexively throw their arms up like hearing “live action My Hero Academia or live action Naruto,” not helping themselves by going for big-spectacle, fantasy-laden shonen hits with an even larger margin for error, for the disrespect Marcus mentioned earlier, to bring it to live action and look shit. If the first of their projects is Akira, Gachiakuta, Fire Punch, or Shangra La Frontier, because they’re popular fantastical works, then all good will for Kodansha Studios is lost.
If Kodansha Studios instead invests in showcasing its creative skills through greenlighting live-action series and films based on more realistic sleeper hits in seinen and shojo genres, like Princess Jellyfish, Blue Period, Hajime no Ippo, or (gulp) Vinland Saga, then, and only then, can it flirt with its strength as a studio capable of delivering on its promises for all its so-called premium projects. Do that, and I can have faith in prospective Kodansha Studio live-action adaptations of series like Knights of Sidonia, Land of the Lustrous, To Your Eternity, Tower Dungeon, and be less gun-shy about them possibly tackling Akira.
