Live-Action Naruto Movie Officially Gets Major 2027 Release Update

Believe it! The live-action Naruto movie has its head down for a ninja run as it sprints towards coming to fruition. The adaptation of the immensely popular manga and anime series has been in the works at Lionsgate for some time, and now it has a major distributor as a production partner, and a production start date that might be sooner than you think.

So far, most information about the film is being kept safely in the Forest of Death. Destin Daniel Cretton, no stranger to martial arts after helming the 2021 MCU film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, will both write and direct the film. May December star Charles Melton is the only cast member so far; he’ll play ninja master Kakashi Hatake in the movie. The production is now looking for candidates to play the title character, a novice ninja trainee who also happens to be the human host for the ferocious nine-tailed fox that once terrorized the Hidden Leaf Village he calls home.

Now, The Hollywood Reporter has the news that Sony will partner with Lionsgate on the film, following a competitive bidding process that involved multiple studios. That will reunite the studio with Cretton, who helmed their $2.5 billion USD blockbuster Spider-Man: Brand New Day last summer. Cretton has an overall deal with the studio, as well. There’s a great potential for synergy here, as Sony owns Crunchyroll, the largest anime distributor in North America. The film will be produced by Avi Arad, Ari Arad, and Emmy Yu for Arad Productions, with Cretton and Jeyun Munford producing for Hisako.

Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely
different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you
would be having within a week.

You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts
works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war
so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting
you.

• You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within
  about five minutes and has never stopped.
• This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every
  single person in your life would be.
• The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you
  do with things you love.
• The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the
  arguments are about to start all over again.

You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where
somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth
rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.

• You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something
  enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
• This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly
  alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
• Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all,
  which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
• Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make
  that argument.

You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one
where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of
it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.

• You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a
  grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
• Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly
  1980 with no sign of resolution.
• The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score
  and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
• You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good
  time.

You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the
argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in
space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.

• You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major
  franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
• The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that
  makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
• Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is
  appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
• You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you
  will always find somebody willing to have it.

What’s Next for Destin Daniel Cretton?

Still basking in the glory of Brand New Day‘s box-office web-slinging, Cretton is next set to helm a big-screen adaptation of Hawaii Five-O, the classic Honolulu-set action drama; it’s a project dear to Cretton’s heart, as he’s a native of the Aloha State. He’s also being courted by Sony and Disney to direct a Brand New Day sequel, the fifth in their series of Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. However, one project of his won’t be moving forward; despite being renewed for a second season, the satirical Hollywood superhero series Wonder Man was swiftly un-renewed after a series of cuts at Disney.

Naruto is expected to begin filming in the spring of 2027; no release date has yet been announced. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.