Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc assistant director Masato Nakazono, president of MAPPA and the film’s supervising producer Manabu Otsuka, and CGI producer Yusuke Tannawa appeared at New York Comic Con on Sunday, where they discussed delivering one of Chainsaw Man’s more popular arcs.
According to Nakazono, for the team — which was led by director Tatsuya Yoshihara — it was important that the film “inherited the strengths of the TV series, so we worked together to highlight the essence of the original manga” as well as the show in the best way for a theatrical film.
“For example, in terms of the visual look, Makima’s hair color has been changed. [We] would make it more vibrant, more color that will stand out in a film,” Nakazono said via a translator. “We wanted to inherit the anime series, but size-wise, [it] is different. We had to make sure that all the background would fit in the theatrical frame as well, so we worked hard on that.”
Speaking to challenges around bringing the manga-turned-TV series to the big screen, Nakazono explained how the film’s team expanded the dialogue from the manga as they adapted it. “There are no speaking words between panels, so we have to create that and make sure the dialogue is going to stand up,” he explained. “The characters Reze and Denji have very personal, intimate relations. Denji thinks Reze is so cute, so we wanted to do things that made the audience feel the same way as Denji would.”
In terms of the film’s animation, which blends 2D and 3D styling, Tannawa explained how the “wanted to make sure the 2D and 3D coexisted naturally as one visual.” Additionally, with the scale and sizing of a TV series and film being different, “we had to make sure the background would fit into the theatrical frame as well.”
Addressing why the Chainsaw Man movie’s creative team partnered with Sony to distribute the film internationally — a nontypical distribution approach for anime — Otsuka explained it was driven by them wanting to tell the next story arc after the first season of the anime series on the big screen.
“The season one TV series of Chainsaw Man has been praised, so there was talk of making a sequel to that. We wanted to make a sequel as a film, not on TV. There were so many fans who have enjoyed it, so we felt like Chainsaw Man would be [released] as one independent film, and we felt like Sony distribution would help us, and that’s how we decided to collaborate with them,” he said.
Later in the panel, after screening clips and animatics with live commentary and holding giveaways for fans, the panel shared messages from the director and character designer.
“With this film, all of us on the staff wanted to convey the fun and the appeal of Chainsaw Man to as many people as possible, so we gave it our all this time,” wrote Kazutaka. “We work to fully capture the charm of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s characters. The action scenes are like an amusement park ride. You can just empty your head and enjoy them.”
“In Reze Arc, a completely new genre is born — love, violence, action, romance, shark. I believe it’s a film whose impact will differ depending on which character’s perspective you follow. You can feel the thrill and the tension throughout the action, and you can also sense the preciousness of each character through the romance elements,” the message from Yoshihara read. “In Chainsaw Man, devils regain their strength by consuming blood. For Reze Arc, every member of the production team offered up a huge amount of blood, and as a result, the movie is bursting with energy. Every time you go to the theater to watch Reze Arc, it gives strength to all of us on the staff as well.”
Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc will release in theaters on Oct. 24.
Disney’s reboot Tron: Ares malfunctioned badly in its box office debut, coming in well behind expectations with a domestic opening of $33.5 million from 4,000 theaters. Unless it can solve its problem quickly, it will once and for all end hopes of rebooting a storied, yet troubled, sci-fi franchise that began more than four decades ago when the first film became a cult classic.
Overseas — where the sci-fi genre is an even harder sell — Ares also disappointed with a debut of $27 million for a global start of $60.5 million. It unfurled everywhere except for China, where it opens next weekend.
Heading into the weekend, the big-budget event pic had been tracking to open to $40 million to $45 million domestically (at one point, $50 million was even a possibility) against a hefty net production budget of $180 million after tens of millions in tax breaks and production incentives.
The Tron film franchise has always been challenged, resulting in terms of long gaps between installments. It took 33 years for the sequel, Tron: Legacy, to hit the big screen. Debuting in 2015, Legacy opened to $44 million domestically on its way to earning $409.9 million globally, not adjusted for inflation. Ares was in development for a decade, but former Disney exec Sean Bailey refused to give up and shepherded the project when serving as head of Disney’s live-action studio.
Disney insiders were well aware that Tron: Ares might encounter trouble in its box office debut. The hope now is that solid audience scores can make up for decidedly mixed reviews. Its current critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes is 57 percent, while the audience ranking is much better at 87 percent. And it got four out of five stars on PostTrak. Also, it has little competition coming up and will retain Imax, Dolby Cinema and other premium large-format screens, which combined accounted for an unheard of 67 percent of opening weekend earnings.
Norwegian Disney vet Joachim Rønning directs the third film, which stars Jared Leto as the eponymous program, Ares, Greta Lee as Eve Kim, CEO of ENCOM, the tech corporation at the center of the series since the start, and Evan Peters as baddie Julian Dillinger.
Another new major studio offering this weekend is Miramax and Paramount’s romantic crime-caper comedy Roofman, starring Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst. Derek Cianfrance directed the pic, which co-stars LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple and Peter Dinklage.
Roofman came in on the low end of expectations with an estimated $8 million from 3,362 theaters, but who is counting when the film’s net production budget is a modest $19 million (tracking had it debuting at $8 million to $10 million). Miramax produced and financed the film, which hoped to serve as counter-programming for females not interested in Tron or the myriad of male-skewing films dominating the marquee. So far, however, more males than females are showing up to see the film, even if by a slim margin.
Unlike Tron, Roofman boasts strong reviews, although moviegoer reaction is relatively similar. Roofman‘s Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score is 85 percent, while the audience score is 84 percent. Both films received a B+ from polling service CinemaScore, as well as four out of five stars on PostTrak.
Based on a true story, Roofman follows the adventures of an Army veteran and struggling father who turns to robbing McDonald’s restaurants by cutting holes in their roofs, earning him the nickname Roofman. After escaping prison, he secretly lives inside a Toys “R” Us for six months, surviving undetected while planning his next move, but his double life begins to unravel when he falls in love.
Another new nationwide offering is Soul of Fire, from Sony’s faith-based Affirm label. The movie opened to $3 million from 1,730 locations for a sixth-place finish. The good news: the movie reportedly cost a net $3 million to produce and earned an A CinemaScore. It is doing best in America’s heartland and the South.
At the specialty box office, A24 launched its Rose Byrne-starrer If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in four theaters for an estimated per-location north of $27,000, the best of the weekend.
Amazon MGM Studios is also going the platform route with Luca Guadagnino’s specialty psychological thriller After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts. It’s paying off so far; the #MeToo movie opened in six theaters for a promising per-location average of $25,745. The awards contender, which also stars Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny, made the rounds at the fall film festivals and is about a sexual assault accusation that tears apart Yale’s philosophy department.
The score for After the Hunt is from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who are on double duty, having also done the score for Tron: Ares (in the latter, they are credited by their band’s name, Nine Inch Nails).
Among holdovers, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, came in third with an estimated weekend gross of $6.7 from 3,127 sites, a drop of 39 percent. Some box office pundits are stumped that the high-profile awards contender from Warner Bros. isn’t holding in stronger after earning a coveted A+ CinemaScore, but the film’s fate is far from being decided (it is only in its third outing). Overseas, it took in another $15 million for a global tally of $83.5 million and $138 million globally.
New Line and Warner Bros.’ The Conjuring: Last Rites achieved a major milestone in screaming past the $300 million mark internationally. In North America, it rounded out the top five with $3 million from 2,334 cinemas for a domestic tally of $233.4 million and a profit-popping $473 million.
Japanese manga blockbuster Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle also notched a major milestone this weekend in passing up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to become the top-grossing international film of all time at the domestic box office with a cume of $128.6 million, not adjusted for inflation (it came in seventh for the frame with $3 million from 1,834 sites. Sony’s Crunchyroll is handling the blockbuster both domestically and in numerous foreign territories outside of Japan; its share of the film’s global total of $648 million is $336 million.)
Dwayne Johnson-starrer The Smashing Machine appeared to collapse in its second weekend after getting snubbed by audiences, despite solid reviews. The A24 pic dropped nearly 70 percent to $1.7 million from 3,321 theaters for a paltry 10-day domestic total of $9.8 million and an eighth-place finish. The movie, which kicked off its awards campaign with a splashy world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, marks Johnson’s first foray into Oscar territory. The Benny Safdie-directed pic cost $50 million to produce before marketing, a high price tag for an indie pic, although Johnson himself took a far lower fee than he usually commands.
Oscar winner Chloé Zhao reflected on her career as a neurodivergent filmmaker at a BFI London Film Festival session on Sunday morning.
The Chinese director, who on Saturday premiered her long-awaited Hamnetalongside stars Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley and producers Steven Spielberg and Sam Mendes, spoke candidly to a small audience about crafting Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017), Nomadland (2020) — the feature that brought her Academy Award acclaim — and Eternals (2021).
“I’m neurodivergent, so I’ve always [been] quite confused why I don’t fit in, or why certain things are so easy for other people but so hard for me — like small talk,” Zhao began when asked about being an actor’s director. “It’s very easy for me to be overstimulated, because I take in a lot more information. I’m already assuming what you think of me,” she said, gesturing to an audience member. “What does your outfit mean? Where do you come from? I do these things all the time. I can’t shut it off.”
“But later on, once I understood it and I could put language around it, I [realized] I have the ability to recognize patterns, maybe I’m just faster or more sensitive. So if that’s used in the right space, then I can almost predict certain situations. It’s helpful if you are on set and just feeling the dissonance [with actors]. Even off camera, you want to go, ‘What is it?’ And usually in that kind of setting, they will share, and then you go, ‘Okay, what’s underneath is actually interesting. This is not what we wrote for this character in this moment. But that’s where you are right now. So are you willing to take the mask right now and let the world see what’s underneath?’ It’s not always a yes — certainly with the professional actors… but if they do in that moment, it’s really special because that’s the kind of authenticity that I think is a performer’s greatest gift to the world.”
Zhao joked about her extreme sensitivity to this dissonance: “So if you’re smiling and you’re actually sad, that’s why small talk is hard. I go: ‘What’s happened?’ What’s your childhood trauma?’ which is not always welcome,” she added as the crowd laughed.
“I think it’s a superpower, I really do,” she continued. “And it’s a spectrum. So everyone is very different… I find that I question sometimes: am I not the typical one? Or has our world become a little bit too inhabitable? Is this too loud? Is it too bright? It’s too fast, you know? So I try to not think of it as less different,” she said. “If I tune into how I function then I’m going to create a world, not just on camera, but also off camera, that is going to be healthy for me.”
Zhao is in London promoting her newest film Hamnet, starring Irish talent Mescal as William Shakespeare and Buckley as his wife, Agnes, who are thrown into contrasting experiences of grief following the death of their young son, Hamnet. The gut-wrenching drama had audiences reaching for the tissues at Saturday’s premiere.
The filmmaker is also well known for making the MCU’s 2021 blockbuster Eternals, a departure from the realism of her previous films. Though Zhao said the feature’s sci-fi and fantasy elements were a huge draw for her. “My dream when I was a girl was to become a manga artist,” said the Beijing-born director. “I drew Japanese manga religiously every day, and I consumed everything there was at that time. So I have always loved telling stories through fantasy or mythology.”
Eternals, starring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Barry Keoghan, Richard Madden and Gemma Chan, is still the only film of Zhao’s that she storyboarded. “Because my manga skills!” she giggled. “I really enjoyed them, [drawing] the big eyes.”
On making the Marvel film, Zhao explained that she was at a moment in her life where “a lot of stuff was bubbling inside of me.”
“I made three films, I traveled around, I met people, and I looked at the East and the West, I looked at different cultures I encountered,” she said. “It was like a volcano inside of me that wanted to examine the human condition so desperately. I’m still sort of working through the eruption and that eruption was Eternals.”
Growing up in Beijing, she added, meant that Zhao and her family were able to watch one Western film a week. Her first ever? The Terminator (1984). “I know. It’s great,” she said. “The second one I saw was Ghost and then the third one was Sister Act.”
There’s a very funny scene in Ron Howard’s frothy 1984 interspecies rom-com, Splash, in which Daryl Hannah, playing a mermaid in Manhattan who swaps her tail for legs, skips out to buy suitable land attire. Given that she emerged from the sea naked, she throws together an outfit from the Tom Hanks character’s closet.
The “fish out of water” turns up on a Bloomingdale’s womenswear floor in a men’s black suit, white shirt, black leather derbies and what looks like a school tie. The ensemble instantly brings a horrified saleslady scurrying over: “Oh my God, darling, darling, darling! That outfit is to die from! What happened, you saw Annie Hall a hundred times? That look is over.”
That was seven years after the release of Annie Hall and the imprint on fashion and popular culture of Diane Keaton’s iconic looks as the title character remained an instantly identifiable reference.
Even more than Marlene Dietrich had done in white tie and tuxedo ensembles in the 1930s, Keaton in Annie Hall kickstarted a wave of genderless dressing with her men’s shirts and wide ties, slouchy trousers and oversized jackets, button-up vests and fedoras.
What made the layered wardrobe trend resonate — and continue to be seen on stylish women today — was how effortlessly cool it looked on Keaton. Her outfits were eccentric but unfussy, tomboyish but distinctly feminine. They made her character appear confident, even at her most insecure. And while the costumes mostly came from shopping expeditions to Ralph Lauren and other menswear emporiums, they were 100 percent reflective of Keaton’s personal style off-camera.
The misconception that comedy is easy — and that Keaton was essentially playing a version of herself — caused some quiet ripples of discontent when she beat out competition that included Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine in dramatic roles to take home the best actress Oscar in 1977.
But Keaton’s justly honored performance in Annie Hall endures for reasons that go far beyond the synthesis of her on- and offscreen personas. She essentially reinvented the classic screwball heroine for a more socially evolved age. Annie might have come off to a casual observer as a kooky ditz, but she was clever, witty, talented, a sponge for knowledge and, eventually, an assertive voice for her own independence.
She emerged with a wave of actresses in the 1970s and early ‘80s that defied traditional standards of silver-screen glamour by being utterly natural, among them Karen Allen, Brooke Adams, JoBeth Williams, Jill Clayburgh and Margot Kidder. And yet Keaton was very much an original, never part of any pack.
The announcement of her unexpected death at 79, less than a month after Robert Redford’s passing, represents another stinging loss to the pantheon of New Hollywood in the decades before the major studios largely stepped away from making movies for grownups.
Irrespective of your views on the now-controversial figure of Woody Allen, the films he made with Keaton, both during and after their romantic involvement, remain among her most outstanding screen work — Annie Hall and Manhattan in particular.
That’s at least partly because while Keaton’s characters might have been amused by the brainy verbosity and self-effacing neuroses of Allen’s alter egos, she was never intimidated or outmatched by them. She challenged her writer-director and co-star in ways that few other women in his movies ever have.
Keaton’s innate radiance and verve made her born to play comedy, but she was no less gifted a dramatic actor. The women in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy are generally submissive. But Keaton made Kay Adams-Corleone — an initially naïve outsider, favoring love over clarity as she agrees to marry Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone — the moral tether to the outside world, beyond the vicious criminal enterprises of the Mafia dynasty. She stands up to Michael and walks away, as few others get to do.
The same year Annie Hall was released, Keaton took on a risky role for a rising-star actress in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In a fearless performance, she played Theresa Dunn, a dedicated schoolteacher whose repressive Catholic upbringing and history of childhood illness become fuel for her defiant sexuality. After feeling used and disrespected in her first experiences with men, Theresa throws herself into an increasingly dark spiral of sleazy pickup bars and hookups with strangers, ultimately with fatal results.
With a lesser interpreter, the movie might have been just a sensationalistic shocker, but Keaton brought integrity and emotional candor to Theresa’s messy search to define herself. That made it a rare example for its time of a character study that explored a modern woman’s erotic desires without shame.
Keaton was tough, impassioned and ultimately heartbreaking as feminist journalist and Russian Revolution sympathizer Louise Bryant, starring opposite writer-director (and offscreen partner at the time) Warren Beatty as Bohemian communist activist John Reed in his 1981 historical epic, Reds.
But her crowning dramatic achievement came arguably the following year in Alan Parker’s raw, unflinching depiction of marital breakdown Shoot the Moon, starring opposite Albert Finney. In an ecstatic New Yorker review, Pauline Kael described their characters as torn from inside the writer, director and the two stars. Faith Dunlop was a role that allowed Keaton to embrace both depression and steadfast self-possession, refusing to endure more pain from the man she married, even at the cost of great distress to their children.
“Diane Keaton acts on a different plane from her previous film roles,” wrote Kael. “She brings the character a full measure of dread and awareness, and does it in a special, intuitive way that’s right for screen acting. Nothing looks rehearsed, yet it’s all fully created.”
Aside from Paolo Sorrentino, who gave Keaton red meat to chew on as the formidable American nun and spiritual consigliere in the HBO series The Young Pope, it’s disappointing that in the later years of her six-decade career, directors mostly stopped challenging Keaton.
More often they leaned on her signature quirks and mannerisms, at times pushing her to the point of self-caricature. But Keaton could shine even in humdrum material and there are gems among the many cute comedies she could do with her hands tied behind her back.
One such keeper is The First Wives Club, an effervescent feminist revenge comedy in which Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler play women pushed aside for younger models who turn the tables on their philandering husbands. Another is the role that landed Keaton her fourth Oscar nomination, in Nancy Meyers’ advanced-age romantic comedy, Something’s Gotta Give. She stars as a whip-smart playwright who’s much more than a foil to Jack Nicholson’s smug playboy, who prides himself on dating only women under 30.
With her sheer, undiminished magnetism alone, Keaton remained a feisty rebuke to that kind of ageism in Hollywood. Her vitality was unextinguishable. We are fortunate to have shared so much of her life.
Keaton with Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, one of many collaborations with the actor-writer-director, which also included 1977’s Annie Hall (more on that later), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979) and Radio Days (1987).
Mortal Kombat II screenwriter Jeremy Slater revealed that New Line and Warner Bros. have already greenlit the next film at the end of the sequel’s Saturday New York Comic Con panel, telling the excited crowd to show up to theaters next summer and “make sure they know there’s an audience for this movie because we want to keep making them for you guys.”
Slater was on hand Saturday alongside director Simon McQuoid and sequel cast members Karl Urban, Adeline Rudolph, Tati Gabrielle and Martyn Ford, where they talked sequel delays and what fans can expect out of the next chapter. McQuoid, who took the question about the movie’s release shift from October to May 16, 2026, said the sequel was delayed as a result of being “a victim of our own success.”
“Every time people have seen this movie, it’s gained momentum,” the director continued. “We’ve created a massive summer blockbuster, so I think we should all be proud of the fact that Mortal Kombat II and the franchise itself is going to kick off next year. Yes, we have to wait, but it’s going to feel massive when it comes out.”
The panel kicked off with a BTS feature, featuring members of the cast teasing the “fatalities, the flawless victories,” and a massive scale before promising a “sequel that is bigger in every way possible,” before McQuoid began addressing the “blockbuster” sequel that Slater noted heavily centers Johnny Cage (Urban) and Kitana (Rudolph).
“The goal was, after the first one came out, really, to make Mortal Kombat II feel like a full-length feature version of the tone we created in the opening of Mortal Kombat I. We felt that we just scratched the surface. There is so much to Mortal Kombat, to the lore, so much to work with that I thought we could just expand everything onto an even greater scale,” he said. “It was about pushing the boundaries with everything. I wanted to have much more emotion with the characters, so there were much higher highs and lower lows. I wanted us to journey through all of the realms and different places, levels and environments you can go to in Mortal Kombat. I wanted us to spend more time in those places and to be able to use the treasure trove created over the years.”
In terms of how the film will balance its action, narrative and emotion, Slater noted that he relied on his inner fan as his North Star. “It’s a great problem to have when you have a movie with 20 main characters. There’s so much to choose from. It’s so daunting at the same time,” he said. “You can’t make a six-hour Mortal Kombat movie.”
More emotion doesn’t mean less action, though, with McQuoid noting that he tried to bring twice as many fights as the first film. “The tournament itself allowed us to create a structure that the storylines all went through. All of our characters, their journeys have to go through the tournament. We wanted to do that in a way that was visually massive, interesting, but has the variety that Mortal Kombat always has,” he said.
“A lot of traditional fighting tournament movies, there’s a fight and then you can go to the bathroom,” added Slater. “We didn’t want that structure. In between the tournament, the characters have their own missions and adventures they’re going on, so there’s no downtime.”
The film will also hit theaters in IMAX, with McQuoid noting that he wanted to do “a little bit more” with what IMAX already gives filmmakers. “I actually wanted to do something with that real estate that, if you consider yourself a fan of Mortal Kombat, you have to see it in IMAX. There are some little bits of joy in there. You won’t see it in regular screenings, and it affects the story a little bit.”
During the panel, the cast also teased their characters’ journeys and how they prepared themselves for the roles. For Cage, “When we first see him, he’s a very dispirited character. His career is completely in the tank. He’s not been keeping up with his training. The world has forgotten who Johnny Cage is,” Urban explained, noting he has very little of the brash cockiness fans know. “He’s just a broken man.”
Cage is then drafted to fight, and “through the course of the movie, you’re going to get to see him transform into a true champion of Earth Realm, a hero involuntarily launched into this insane action adventure.”
“The Johnny Cage of the game isn’t necessarily a character you can go on a journey with. He already has everything,” Slater explained. “It was fun to start him at a lower place and watch him become the Johnny Cage we know and love.”
