Legendary Entertainment’s planned live-action film adaptation of My Hero Academia has found a home at Netflix.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix has acquired Legendary’s My Hero Academia film, which is being written by Joby Harold (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Army of the Dead). The live-action feature will be directed and executive produced by Shinsuke Sato in his English-language debut. In his native Japan, Sato has helmed a number of live-action films based on manga and anime series, including Gantz, Death Note: Light Up the New World, Bleach and Kingdom, among others. Legendary first picked up the film rights to My Hero Academia in 2018.
What Is My Hero Academia?
Written and illustrated by Kōhei Horikoshi, Boku no Hīrō Akademia — or My Hero Academia, in English — is a superhero manga that has been serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shōnen Jump since 2014. The manga takes place in a world where superpowers — known as “Quirks” — are commonplace. However, not everyone has a Quirk of their own.
My Hero Academia centers on Izuku Midoriya, also known as Deku, a boy who was born without a Quirk, but still dreams of becoming a superhero. Japan’s premier superhero, All Might, bestows his own quirk onto Izuku, allowing him to enroll at U.A. High School, an academy that trains superheroes. To date, 375 chapters of Horikoshi’s My Hero Academia manga have been published in Weekly Shōnen Jump, with 362 having been collected in 36 tankōbon volumes thus far. The original manga has also spawned a number of spinoffs, including My Hero Academia: Smash!!, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes and My Hero Academia: Team-Up Missions.
An anime adaptation of My Hero Academia premiered in Japan in 2016 before getting an English-language release in 2018. The anime is currently in the midst of its sixth season, having aired 124 episodes in Japanese and 115 episodes in English at the time of writing. Three anime feature films have also been released as part of the franchise, including My Hero Academia: Two Heroes (2018), My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising (2019) and My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission (2021).
Netflix Is Staying in the Live-Action Anime Business
Of course, Legendary’s My Hero Academia film is far from the first live-action adaptation of an anime/manga property to land at Netflix. The streaming giant previously released 2017’s Death Note (not to be confused with Sato’s 2016 film), a feature based on the manga/anime of the same name. In 2021, Netflix also released a live-action series based on the anime Cowboy Bebop.
In addition to My Hero Academia, Netflix has a number of other anime-based projects currently in the works, including a series based on One Piece. The streamer is also taking another crack at adapting Death Note, this time as a live-action series instead of a feature film. While not an anime, per se, the anime-inspired cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender is also headed for a live-action series adaptation at Netflix.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
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