Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc didn’t just drop in late 2025 and light up the box office and streaming charts — it doubled as Tatsuki Fujimoto’s big, chaotic love letter to movies. The film is jammed with nods to everything from French New Wave to splashy studio fare, some subtle, some screamingly obvious. Here’s the fun part: once you start spotting them, you can’t stop.
Quick context before we dive in
Title: Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc. Studio: MAPPA. Genre: action, horror, supernatural. Japan got it on September 19, 2025, and the US rollout hit October 24, 2025. It’s sitting pretty with an IMDb 8.5/10 and a sky-high 9.16/10 on MyAnimeList. And yes, it’s streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
The cinematic nods I clocked (ranked from subtle to screaming)
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Blue Spring (2001)
A plane glides overhead as Reze looks up — a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that mirrors the framing from the Japanese teen drama Blue Spring. It’s not just a plane-in-the-sky thing; the composition and placement line up almost one-to-one.
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Sallie Gardner at a Gallop / The Horse in Motion (1878)
Denji’s grayscale horseback shot is a straight wink at Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic series that basically birthed motion pictures. Shooting it monochrome is the giveaway — the movie pauses to tip its hat to cinema’s first steps.
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Constantine (2005)
Angel (the Angel Devil) touches down at the playground with those eerie, hovering feet during the opening. If you’re thinking of Lucifer’s hospital entrance in Constantine, you’re not alone. Could it be coincidence? Sure. But knowing Fujimoto’s film brain, I’m leaning homage.
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28 Days Later (2002)
The single raindrop landing on Reze’s eye echoes a very specific moment from Danny Boyle’s horror classic — the miserable start of Frank’s fate. The staging is so similar it’s hard not to hear the alarm bells.
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Bande a part (1964) and 8 1/2 (1963)
That integrated intro dance with Denji, Aki, and Power? It carries the DNA of both Godard’s cool-kid groove in Bande a part and Fellini’s playful dream-energy from 8 1/2. The beats and blocking feel too aligned to be accidental.
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Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Kishibe moving through a field of headstones in the intro mirrors Spielberg’s solemn cemetery imagery. It’s the same language: a war-scarred vet among graves, memory and violence pressed into one frame.
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Despicable Me 2 (2013)
Denji charging into battle on Beam (the shark fiend) against Reze and the Typhoon Devil is hilarious on its own — and it also plays like a rowdy riff on El Macho riding a shark into a volcano. Intentional or not, the parallel is too perfect to ignore.
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Leon: The Professional (1994)
In the opening montage, Denji holds up a grenade pin before promptly exploding. That’s an unmistakable echo of Leon’s final move — handing Norman Stansfield a pin to reveal the bomb wrapped around him. Different context, same grim punchline.
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Battle Royale (2000)
Reze’s confrontation with Nomo at the Devil Extermination Division 2 training facility is gnarly: she pops off her own head, tosses it inside, and the head turns out to be a bomb. That severed-head-as-explosive beat tracks with Battle Royale’s brutal bag of tricks. It’s a clear inspiration channel.
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No Country for Old Men (2007)
Mid-movie, a so-called Mysterious Man shows up to claim Denji’s heart. The chase spills into a courtyard, Reze flips the switch from scared to lethal, and strangles him. The staging and rhythm trace the Coens’ suffocating choke sequence — it’s the closest thing here to a frame-by-frame homage.
So... Hollywood superfan Tatsuki Fujimoto?
Pretty much. The Reze Arc movie works on its own as a brutal, swoony detour in Denji’s life, but it also plays like Fujimoto opening his scrapbook of movie obsessions. Some references are loud, some are arguable, but the pattern is undeniable.
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. If you spotted a nod I missed — or you want to argue one of the maybes — drop it in the comments.