Sony is co-financing Lionsgate’s live-action Naruto film and will handle international distribution, according to a Tuesday report from The Hollywood Reporter. The same report says the film has been greenlit to begin production in spring 2027, following a bidding round that involved several studios.
Sony has not announced anything itself. Neither has Lionsgate. Treat the details as reported rather than confirmed until a studio statement lands.
The pieces that were already public fill in most of the picture.
Who is making it
Destin Daniel Cretton is directing. He came to the project off Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and has Spider-Man: Brand New Day on his record since. He is producing through his company Hisako alongside Jeyun Munford.
Arad Productions is producing as well. Avi Arad, Ari Arad and Emmy Yu are named as producers, with Jeremy Latcham also on the producing side.
Tasha Huo, who wrote Red Sonja and worked on the Tomb Raider animated series, was reported by Variety in November 2023 as writing the script for Lionsgate’s film. Whether that draft is still the one in play has not been stated.
Casting is already open
The franchise’s official website announced on July 10 that a global casting search had begun for the three leads: Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura. Casting for other characters was pushed to a later date.
The Hollywood Reporter previously reported that Charles Melton, of Riverdale and Beef, was in final negotiations to play Kakashi Hatake. That was a negotiation report, not a done deal, and nothing since has confirmed it.
A project with a long, messy history
Naruto has been in and out of development in Hollywood for over a decade, and the trail explains why the spring 2027 date matters.
The Tracking Board reported in July 2015 that Lionsgate had closed the rights and was in talks with Michael Gracey, then best known for The Greatest Showman, to direct. The Naruto and Boruto stage presentation at Jump Festa in 2016 confirmed that Lionsgate and Gracey were working on the film and that Masashi Kishimoto was involved.
The Hollywood Reporter reported in August 2017 that Jon and Erich Hoeber, who wrote Red and Red 2, were rewriting the script. In March 2018, Collider reported that Gracey said the script was still being worked on because he wanted Kishimoto’s approval before moving forward.
Cretton’s involvement was reported in February 2024. It is unclear whether anyone from the earlier lineup besides Huo remains attached.
Why the Sony deal is the real news
Financing and distribution are what separate a project that keeps getting announced from one that actually shoots. A studio committing to international distribution means there is now a plan for the film to be seen outside the United States, which is where a Naruto adaptation earns most of its money.
Sony also has a reason to want this. The company has spent years building anime distribution through Crunchyroll and Aniplex, and a live-action Naruto gives it a theatrical property tied to a franchise it already monetises elsewhere.
For Lionsgate, splitting the cost on a film this expensive is the difference between a green light and another year of development.
The scale problem nobody has solved yet
Naruto is 700 chapters long. A two-hour film cannot adapt it, and any attempt to compress the Chuunin Exams into a runtime will feel like a summary.
Cretton’s advantage is that he has already made a film about a young man learning to control an unusual power while a hidden world watches him. The martial arts choreography in Shang-Chi was the strongest part of that movie, and Naruto‘s fights are built on the same kind of readable physicality.
The risk is the opposite one: a film that treats the material as a superhero origin story and loses the thing that makes the manga work, which is that Naruto is loud, annoying and repetitive and the story lets him be all three.
The manga is not resting either
Kishimoto is launching a new manga in the franchise, Naruto Shadow Rising. A four-episode crossover with Ninkū was announced at New York Comic Con in October, and a Naruto card game arrives worldwide in June 2027.
That is a lot of Naruto scheduled around the same window as the film’s production start. The franchise is not being revived for one movie. It is being rebuilt around one.
Source: Anime News Network, citing The Hollywood Reporter.
Featured image: Cover of the first collected volume of Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto manga, via Anime News Network. © 1999 by Masashi Kishimoto/SHUEISHA Inc.
