Watch Studio Pierrot’s ROAD OF NARUTO anniversary video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKELA1qBAKA
Naruto Uzumaki spent roughly 700 chapters of manga insisting that he would never give up, and Hollywood appears to have taken the lesson to heart. Lionsgate first announced a live-action Naruto back in 2015. Eleven years, one change of director and a great many fan-cast Twitter threads later, the film has finally been given the green light.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures is joining the project as co-financier and will handle international distribution, and with that deal done, Lionsgate has officially greenlit the film. Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and this summer’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is writing and directing. He took over in 2024 from Michael Gracey of The Greatest Showman, who had been attached since the beginning.
So far, the cast consists of precisely one man. Charles Melton, of May December and Beef, is in talks to play Kakashi Hatake, the silver-haired, permanently late, mask-wearing teacher who spends his free time reading saucy novels in public. Melton is the only actor attached, which means nobody yet knows who will be stuck wearing the orange jumpsuit. Filming is expected to start early next year, with earlier reports pointing to February 2027. There’s no release date.
Masashi Kishimoto is at least on side. When Cretton came aboard, the manga’s creator said that “in actually meeting Destin, I also found him to be an open-minded director who was willing to embrace my input,” and promised that the film “is bound to be a film with spectacular action and profound drama.” Cretton, for his part, called meeting Kishimoto in Tokyo “a true honor.”
It’s not hard to see why Lionsgate has stopped hesitating. For years, live-action anime was a cursed genre that ate careers: Dragonball Evolution, the Scarlett Johansson Ghost in the Shell and Netflix’s American Death Note all left fans muttering darkly into their manga. Then Netflix’s One Piece proved that a faithful, cheerfully daft adaptation of a long-running shōnen series could be a hit, and studios have been ransacking the Shonen Jump back catalogue ever since. Naruto, which has sold well over 250 million copies, is an obvious next target.
The real test is tone. Naruto is a story about grief, loneliness and an orphan who has a fox demon sealed inside him, told in a world where ninjas wear headbands with their village logo on them and fight by making hand signs at each other. Cretton has form with both halves: Short Term 12 showed he can do wounded children, and Shang-Chi showed he can do kung fu on a bus. If he can make the Naruto run look cool in live action, rather than like a man desperately hunting for the gents, he deserves an honorary Hokage title. Dattebayo.
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