Tokyo Revengers is Japan's Highest Grossing Live-Action Movie in 2021

Live-action adaptations of anime are generally poorly received, but Japanese audiences have embraced the Tokyo Revengers movie.

According to Japanese tracking site Eiga, the live-action adaptation of the popular time-traveling shonen manga surged ahead of Rurouni Kenshin: The Final's ¥4.32 billion (roughly $39.0 million USD) box office total, and now sits at fourth place for the year overall with ¥4.38 billion (about $39.5 million USD) in revenue. This makes Tokyo Revengers the most successful live-action movie in the country for the year so far, placing it ahead of blockbusters such as Fast 9 (which was released under the title Wild Speed: Jet Chase in Japan,) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in the region. Tokyo Revengers has only been outperformed by the top three anime releases for the year, which are Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time in first, Detective Conan: The Scarlet Bullet in second, and Mamoru Hosoda's critically acclaimed Belle in third.

The movie stars Takumi Kitamura as series protagonist Takemichi Hanagaki. Kitamura will also portray another famous anime delinquent, Yusuke Urameshi, in Netflix's upcoming live-action Yu Yu Hakusho series, which began filming in Japan over the summer. The movie also stars Kamen Rider Fourze and Kingdom's Ryo Yoshizawa as Manjiro Sano, one of the founding members of the Tokyo Manji Gang that is at the center of the movie's story.

Tokyo Revengers tells the story of Takemichi, a middle-aged loser whose is devastated to learn that girl who he went out with in middle school, Hinata Tachibana, and her little brother have both been murdered by the violent Tokyo Manji Gang. While wallowing in despair, Takemichi is pushed in front of an oncoming train by an unseen assailant, but instead of dying, he wakes up in the body of his younger self during middle school. Determined to use his knowledge of the future to save Hinata's life, Takemichi uses his second chance to undo his past mistakes and figure out what went wrong with the Tokyo Manji Gang.

Created by Ken Wakui in 2017, Tokyo Revengers is one of the biggest surprise hits to emerge from Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in recent years. The series has over 40 million copies in circulation worldwide and was the recipient of a Kodansha manga award. An anime adaptation was produced by Liden Films, which also produced the Cells At Work! Code Black spinoff series as well as the upcoming card-battle anime Build Divide -#00000 (Code Black). The anime, which began airing in April and recently wrapped up its first season, was simulcast internationally by Crunchyroll.