Golden Kamuy is heading back to live action. WOWOW announced on Friday that it will stream a new series based on Satoru Noda’s manga, titled Golden Kamuy: Karafuto Tsuiseki-hen (Golden Kamuy: Karafuto Pursuit Arc), starting January 24 at 10:00 p.m.
The new show keeps most of the team behind the earlier live-action projects. Kenji Katagiri returns to direct, joined this time by Masaaki Yoshimura. Tetsuo Kamata, who wrote the live-action BLUE LOCK film, takes over script duties from Tsutomu Kuroiwa. Yutaka Yamada and Yoshiaki Dewa are back to compose the music, Hiroshi Nakagawa and Debo Akibe return as Ainu language and cultural advisers, and CREDEUS is producing again.
What Came Before
The first Golden Kamuy live-action film opened in Japan in January 2024 and topped the box office in its opening weekend. It sold 356,000 tickets for 533,848,690 yen, about US$3.44 million, in its first three days. Netflix began streaming that film in May 2024.
A follow-up series, Golden Kamuy: The Hunt of Prisoners in Hokkaido, arrived in October 2024, with Katagiri, Ken Ochiai and Yōsuke Satō sharing directing duties. Netflix added it in February 2025. Rock group ACIDMAN performed the theme song “Kagayakerumono.”
The second film, Golden Kamuy: Attack on Abashiri Prison, opened on March 13 and landed at number three in its debut. Netflix started streaming it on July 13. Kento Yamazaki returns as Saichi Sugimoto and Anna Yamada as Asirpa, with Yū Inaba, Sōkō Wada and Tetta Sugimoto playing Tokishige Usami, Toshiyuki Kadokura and Anji Toni. Rock band 10-FEET handled the theme song, “Kowarete Kieru made.”
The Manga
Satoru Noda launched Golden Kamuy in Shueisha’s Young Jump in 2014 and ended it in April 2022. The series has inspired four anime seasons. The anime’s final arc premiered on January 5 and continues this winter with the climactic “Runaway Train” arc.
Why It Matters
Golden Kamuy is one of the few manga franchises running a live-action and an anime track at the same time. The films built a real box office record, and the first streaming series showed the format could carry a longer arc. A second series, this one named after the Karafuto pursuit story line, suggests WOWOW and the production committee see enough demand to keep going rather than treat the films as a one-off.
The Karafuto arc matters to readers because it moves the story into Sakhalin, expanding the Ainu and Russian threads the manga built its reputation on. Bringing back the same cultural advisers signals the production is keeping that material in careful hands, which has been a point of pride for the adaptation.
The timing also lines up with a busy stretch for manga live-action projects. Fuji TV is adapting Firefly Wedding for 2027, and Keisuke Yoshida is filming Hideki Arai’s SPUNK! — both signs that publishers and studios keep mining manga back catalogues for screen material.
For fans, the news lands while the franchise is mid-cycle: the anime’s final arc is on the air, the second film is streaming, and now a new live-action series is set for January 24.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Golden Kamuy: Karafuto Pursuit Arc live-action series visual, via the Golden Kamuy film series’ official X account.
