Horikoshi’s Hands-On Involvement Could Save or Sink Netflix’s Live-Action My Hero Academia

Live-action anime adaptations are a roulette wheel. For every Netflix One Piece win, there are two or three that make you question why anyone keeps trying. So yeah, a My Hero Academia movie sounds like a minefield. But screenwriter Jason Fuchs just said something that should calm a lot of nerves: the creator himself, Kohei Horikoshi, is all over it.

Horikoshi is reading everything. Literally everything.

Fuchs told Entertainment Weekly that every single step goes past Horikoshi for approval.

"There is no treatment, no outline, no scenes, no nothing that Kohei doesn’t give notes on or react to with a thumbs up or thumbs down."

That level of oversight is rare, and exactly what fans usually beg for. If anything can give this movie a One For All boost, it is the original creator looking at every page and saying yes or nope.

Why that matters (and where this has gone wrong before)

When the people who made the thing are sidelined, you feel it. The tone slips, the characters warp, and suddenly the whole vibe is off. We have all lived through it. On the flip side, staying close to the source tends to pay off. Need receipts? Here you go:

• One Piece (Netflix) - Heavy creator involvement from Eiichiro Oda as an executive producer; fan response: highly positive.
• Bleach (Netflix release of the live-action film) - Moderate, with director Shinsuke Sato steering; fan response: mixed to positive.
• Death Note (Netflix) - Minimal creator involvement; fan response: highly negative.
• Dragonball Evolution (Fox) - Minimal or no involvement from Akira Toriyama; fan response: highly negative.

Good hands behind the camera

Shinsuke Sato is directing. If the name rings a bell, it should: Alice in Borderland and the live-action Bleach are his. He gets how to translate Japanese genre storytelling for a global audience without sanding off all the edges. That is a promising sign for a franchise as stylized and earnest as MHA.

The tricky part: turning a sprawling anime into one movie

Here is the potential downside of being ultra-faithful: manga and anime breathe over dozens of episodes. A movie does not. You cannot cram a season of character arcs, quirks, and tournament brackets into two hours without cutting or reshaping something. If Horikoshi is giving notes on every scene (which, again, is good), the writing process could move slower or get too rigid to let the film be a film. Some quirks are going to be tough to pull off in live action, full stop. The balance is making a crowd-pleasing movie that still feels like My Hero Academia, not a greatest-hits speedrun.

So when do we see it?

The live-action My Hero Academia movie is headed to Netflix. It is in the early stages of script development, which is a polite way of saying: no release date yet.

Where to watch the anime right now

If you want to catch up (or rewatch the Sports Festival for the eighth time):

Crunchyroll has all seasons and the movies. Hulu has all seasons. Netflix has the first four seasons. Amazon Prime Video has individual seasons available to stream.