Fans have been eagerly awaiting word of a second anime season adapting Tatsuki Fujimoto's Chainsaw Man, the popular manga and anime series about a man with chainsaws for hands having complicated feelings. While there’s still no sign of Season 2, the surprise announcement of Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc arrived this weekend, a film adapting a hugely popular section of the original manga.
Production of the film will be handled by MAPPA, the studio behind the first season of the anime along with other massive hits like Jujutsu Kaisen and IGN’s Anime of 2023, Vinland Saga Season 2, though a director or any other details of the production staff have yet to be named.
A short teaser was shown at Jump Fiesta ‘24, the yearly manga and anime convention held in Tokyo, Japan. The trailer has already reached well over two million views on YouTube, wherein we see series main character Denji spending time with a girl who’ll be familiar to manga readers as Reze, and to fans of the anime as a figure we saw only briefly at the end of the first season.
劇場版『チェンソーマン レゼ篇』制作決定！
— チェンソーマン【公式】 (@CHAINSAWMAN_PR) December 17, 2023
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Studio Mappa released the highly successful Jujutsu Kaisen 0 in 2021, the highest-earning animated film at the Japanese box office in the year of release, though it has struggled with the long-delayed Yuri!!! on Ice the Movie: Ice Adolescence, initially due in 2019 and with very few production updates since.
The first season of Chainsaw Man scored a 9/10 from IGN, with reviewer Rafael Motamayor calling it “a fantastic adaptation that not only does justice to the source material, but actively adds to it with cinema-inspired visuals that make this absurd, gory, dumb, and hilarious world feel incredibly real and relatable.”
