Key Points

• Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc was the subject of a New York Comic Con panel on Sunday afternoon.

• The creative team screened footage and teased the “amusement park ride” action sequences.

• “A completely new genre is born: Love, violence, action, romance, shark,” director Tatsuya Yoshihara declared.

This year marks the first time Japanese animation studio MAPPA had a booth setup at New York Comic Con, and the team took this presence at the convention to show off its high-profile 2025 release, Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc.

The film, a direct sequel to the first season of the Chainsaw Man anime series, which itself is an adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga, opened already in various international locations and will now head to U.S. screens this Oct. 24.

Supervising producer Manabu Otsuka, assistant director Masato Nakazono, and CGI producer Yusuke Awane attended a Sunday afternoon MAPPA panel in person, communicating through a translator. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara and character designer Kazutaka Sugiyama couldn’t attend but sent messages for the crowd.

“In Reze Arc, a completely new genre is born: Love, violence, action, romance, shark,” Yoshihara said in a previously written statement that the moderator read aloud to the room. The shark refers to Beam, the main character’s friend and ally who can turn into a giant shark-life form with three eyes.

“You can feel the thrill and the tension throughout the action and you can also sense the preciousness of each character through the romance elements,” he added. “In Chainsaw Man, Devils regain their strength by consuming blood. For Reze Arc, every member of the production team offered up a huge amount of blood and, as a result, the movie is bursting with energy.”

Sugiyama mentioned in his own statement, “This time, we worked to fully capture the charm of [Chainsaw Man manga creator] Tatsuki Fujimoto-san’s characters. The action scenes are like an amusement park ride. You can just empty your head and enjoy them.”

Denji is the titular Chainsaw Man. He worked as a Devil Hunter for the yakuza to pay off the debt he inherited from his parents. When the yakuza betrayed him, a dying Denji made a deal with the dog-like Chainsaw Devil, Pochita. The two fused together, allowing Denji to transform parts of his body into chainsaws. He eventually goes to work for the Public Safety Devil Hunters, a Japanese government agency that combats Devils.

The Chainsaw Man movie now adapts the Reze story arc of the manga, in which a mysterious girl named Reze enters Denji’s life, forcing him to grapple with his conflicting romantic feelings between her and Makima, the head of the Devil Hunters.

The creative team screened a sequence from the film, in which Denji, in his chainsaw form, tears a hole through the roof of a moving car from the inside so he can face off against the powerful Bomb Devil.

Nakazono also teased how the film expands upon the source material.

“As a team, it was important that we inherited the strengths of the TV series, so we worked together to highlight the essence of the original manga, as well as the TV series,” he said through a translator.

He later discussed how, in adapting the manga for the screen, “There are no speaking words in between [manga] panels, so we have to create that and make sure the dialogue is going to stand up.”

Pointing to the characters of Reze and Denji, Nakazono noted how they “have very personal, very intimate relations.”

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He added, “Denji thinks that Reze is so cute, so we wanted them to make sure there will be little things that will make the audience feel the same way as Denji would.”

Tannawa described the visual style of the movie, saying, “We wanted to make sure the 2D and 3D coexist naturally as one visual.”

Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc will open in North American theaters Oct. 24.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly