For decades, the deal for a Japanese game that wanted to be a movie ran one way: sell the rights to a Hollywood studio and pray the result respected the source. The plan taking shape around Lollipop Chainsaw runs the other way. Dragami Games, the studio that now controls the cult 2012 hack-and-slash, is not handing its chainsaw-wielding cheerleader to a major — it is assembling its own international production to make the feature, part of a stated ambition to pioneer “a new model for building globally recognized entertainment franchises from Asia.”

As Deadline first reported, the live-action feature comes under license from Dragami and is being built by a pointedly cross-border team: Nada Holdings’ Joe Teng, former ZDF Studios drama chief Robert Franke through his Orange Chariot banner, Throne Inc’s Takafumi Yuki, Ambitious Entertainment’s Kirk Shaw and Non Stop TV’s Patricio Rabuffetti. The mix of American, European and Japanese producers is the strategy itself — a franchise engineered from the first meeting for worldwide release rather than domestic sale.

The timing is not accidental. Video-game adaptations have swung from studio poison to prestige currency, from HBO’s The Last of Us to the billion-dollar theatrical run of A Minecraft Movie, and Japanese properties are the obvious next seam to mine. What is unusual is who holds the drill. Instead of waiting for a studio to option the game, the rights holder is financing and shaping the film itself, keeping the franchise’s center of gravity in Tokyo rather than Burbank.

There is a cinematic irony buried in the source code. The original game was directed by Goichi Suda and co-written by James Gunn, years before Gunn became co-chief of DC Studios — an accidental blockbuster pedigree the new producers are well placed to invoke. Franke has framed the aim as a film “that feels unmistakably true to the spirit of Lollipop Chainsaw while standing completely on its own,” while Dragami president Shohei Sato called it the franchise’s first live-action feature. The picture is planned as an R-rated action-comedy prequel set at San Romero High, following cheerleader Juliet Starling and her family of zombie hunters before the outbreak that opens the game.

The feature is only one prong of a coordinated relaunch. A PlayStation 5 sequel, Lollipop Chainsaw 2, is in development at Hajime Tabata’s JP Universe for a 2027 window and was shown at this month’s Tokyo Game Show, with separate animated plans also in motion.

If the model holds, the lesson reaches well past one cheerleader: a Japanese studio proving it can turn a cult game that sold more than 1.5 million copies into a worldwide franchise without ever surrendering the keys.

Tags: ip-strategy, James Gunn, Dragami Games, Lollipop Chainsaw, video game movie

Lollipop Chainsaw’s live-action leap is really Japan’s bet to own its IP, not license it

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