Legendary Pictures has found a director for its My Hero Academia live-action movie.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shinsuke Sato will helm the upcoming film, which will be the director's first work in English. Sato is known throughout the Japanese film industry for his many live-action adaptations of popular anime and manga series, including the 2016 live-action Death Note: Light Up The World (not to be confused with Netflix's English language adaptation released the following year), and 2018's Bleach, which currently has a 71% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Sato's most recent work is the Alice in Borderland series, which was also based on a manga and was released on Netflix in 2020 to mostly positive reviews. A second season of the series is currently in development.
My Hero Academia is one of the biggest franchises to emerge out of the anime and manga industry in the last decade. Created by Kohei Horikoshi, the original manga was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 2014, and now has over 50 million copies in circulation worldwide. The series was adapted into an anime in 2016, which is currently airing its fifth season. The most recent animated film in the series, World Heroes' Mission, was released in Japan on Aug. 6 and is currently on track to be the most successful movie in the franchise so far, with over 1 million tickets sold since its premiere.
Horikoshi's manga tells the story of a world where most people are born with a "Quirk," a unique superpower. The series' protagonist, Izuku Midoriya, also known by the initially derogatory nickname "Deku," is one of the rare people in this world born without a Quirk. Despite this, Midoriya idolizes the world's top heroes and strives to be one of them one day. Midoriya gets his chance when he meets the world's most powerful superhero, All Might, who sees potential within the young, idealistic boy and decides to entrust him with a superpower that has the potential to either save or destroy the world.
Further details about Legendary's My Hero Academia movie, including its cast and its release date, have not been announced. The My Hero Academia anime is currently available for streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll and Funimation. The first film in the series, Two Heroes, is available via Netflix, while the second theatrical release, Heroes Rising, is streaming through Hulu. The manga is localized into English and distributed in North America by VIZ Media.
Source: Hollywood Reporter