Name: Kamen Rider Zeztz: Farewell Mission
Director: Kazuya Kamihoriuchi
Genre: Action, Science Fiction
Released: 2026-07-24T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 63 min
Cast: Ryutaro Imai, Shunta Sono, Yuki Furukawa, Kosei Amano, Maho Horiguchi

A superhero show usually signs off with its hero winning. This one signs off with him running. The theatrical farewell to Kamen Rider Zeztz opens on its costumed lead accused of bombing a government building he never touched, his face on every screen in the country and the public already sure of the verdict.

The structural bet is simple and cruel. The film withholds nothing from the audience, who know the hero is innocent, and then makes an entire nation behave as if he is not. The manhunt is not run by a shadowy cell. It is run by a security official with a badge and a plan, a man who has worked out that the quickest route to power is to hand the crowd a villain and let its anger do the labor.

Ryutaro Imai carries that reversal as Baku Yorozu, the daydreaming recruit who transforms into Kamen Rider Zeztz. The casting that matters most, though, sits on the other side. Shunta Sono plays Shuma Kumon, the official steering the hunt, who is also Kamen Rider Mugen, a rival whose power runs on daydreams instead of the series’ spy tech. Yuki Furukawa’s Nox, the ally Baku turns to once the state stops listening, closes a triangle in which the hero’s only witnesses are the two people the system has already discarded.

For readers outside its home market, some grounding helps. Kamen Rider is Toei’s long-running tokusatsu line, a weekly institution in Japan in which a masked hero in an insect-styled suit fights monsters and, increasingly, argues about ethics. Zeztz is its current entry, a spy-fiction spin in which the missions are as much about deception as combat. Ending that run on a wrongful-accusation plot suits a show that has spent its season asking what a dream is worth once someone else controls it.

Kazuya Kamihoriuchi, a regular hand across recent Rider features, stages the chase, and Yuya Takahashi, the series’ head writer, keeps the script inside the show’s founding idea. Zeztz has always treated dreams as infrastructure. Its lead is a young man who wants to be a secret agent, its transformation belt runs on that wish, and the organization at its center, C.O.D.E., handles imagination as a working tool. The film pushes the metaphor to a darker reading. If a dream can arm a hero, a daydream can be mass-produced and aimed.

That is where the piece reaches past a monster-of-the-week finale. Kumon’s scheme is not destruction for its own sake. It is manufactured consent. He does not need to beat Zeztz in a fight so much as convince a country it has already beaten him. The word farewell in the title works two ways, marking both a goodbye to the series and the hero’s forced exit from public trust, and the drama turns on whether the truth can outrun a story the crowd would rather believe.

The choice to make crowd anger the weapon gives the finale an unexpectedly current charge. The villain wins by narrative rather than by force, and the hero’s problem is less a fight he can win than a consensus he cannot break. It is the rare franchise finale where the climactic obstacle is not a bigger monster but a smaller, colder question, namely what a masked hero is supposed to do once the people he protects have decided he is the threat. That is a heavier idea than a holiday-slot Rider film usually shoulders, and the reason the send-off reads as more than a victory lap.

How far a 63-minute summer feature can carry that idea is the fair question. Rider films built for the school-holiday slot tend to resolve cleanly and double as bridges to the next series, and this one is no exception, seeding the arrival of Kamen Rider My-Th before the franchise changes hands. The paranoid framing may prove a costume worn lightly, the conspiracy tidied away in time for the belt to light up. A film this short can gesture at what it raises without fully litigating it.

The ensemble cast of Kamen Rider Zeztz Farewell Mission in 2026 — The titular hero of *Kamen Rider Zeztz: Farewell Mission* (2026)

The feature screens as one half of a double bill, paired with Super Space Sheriff Gavan Infinity: The Day the Sun Cried under Toei’s summer program, the studio’s habit of stacking two of its hero franchises into a single ticket for the school break. Kosei Amano, a tokusatsu veteran who has moved through several Rider generations, and Maho Horiguchi appear among the returning cast, while the incoming series’ leads turn up early to plant the handover. Yuta performs the theme song, “Dreams Never Sleep,” which lends the send-off its title-page melancholy.

Kamen Rider Zeztz: Farewell Mission opens in Japanese theaters on July 24, 2026, running 63 minutes as part of the paired summer program. No release outside Japan has been confirmed, and overseas followers of the franchise will most likely meet it through later home-video and streaming windows rather than a theatrical run.