A new samurai series designed by a Palme d’Or-winning Japanese director will soon be broadcast on a streaming platform!
There will be no season 2 for Shôgun, the best series of the moment… But a new samurai series is about to see the light of day!
On the occasion of the Asian Film Awards ceremony during which he was awarded the Best Director Prize, Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda revealed to Deadline having completed filming of a new series, started last fall.
Although he was not able to reveal which platform will broadcast the program (the acquisition of the rights having not yet been finalized), the winner of the 2018 Palme d’Or (for the film A Family Affair) however, clarified that this project was the remake of a very popular Japanese soap opera broadcast on television around forty years ago.
Japanese film industry in danger?
Although he is delighted with the development of his career which allows him to pursue a series of projects (in cinema and television), Kore-eda nevertheless painted a more pessimistic portrait of the economic situation of the Japanese cinema industry. . “The teams cannot make a living,” deplores the latter, despite the success encountered by Japanese cinema on an international scale.
New people are entering the industry. However, if people think that this is a renewal of the audience or that the film industry is doing better than before, I can tell them that is not true. (…) There are a lot of new shoots, but people are no longer able to earn enough money to live. To the point that we will have to work to find solutions, otherwise it will become difficult to continue making Japanese films in the future.
Netflix offers the greatest Japanese directors
Like Hirokazu Kore-eda, now associated with streaming platforms (he notably signed the series Makanai: In the Maiko Kitchen available on Netflix), the filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) has also joined forces to Netflix for a long-term contract: “I’m going to be their employee for the next five years,” he commented with humor to Deadline on the same occasion.
As unpopular as this observation may be, the future of Japanese cinema will (perhaps) pass through streaming platforms? A solution that is certainly far from ideal, but to which some of the biggest names in Japanese cinema today already seem ready to give in…