Products You May Like
Juliet Starling is getting out of the console. Dragami Games used Tokyo Game Show to announce a live-action Lollipop Chainsaw feature film, billed as an R-rated action comedy and a prequel set before the events of the 2012 game. Deadline broke the news.
The producing team is international and, notably, not a studio you would guess: Joe Teng of Nada Holdings, Robert Franke of Orange Chariot, Takafumi Yuki of Throne Inc, Kirk Shaw of Ambitious Entertainment and Patricio Rabuffetti of Non Stop TV. Franke, formerly the drama chief at ZDF Studios, framed the pitch as a crossover play rather than a fan artifact.
Our ambition is to create a film that entertains audiences everywhere, whether they’ve played the game or not.
Robert Franke, producer
Dragami president Shohei Sato said the studio is “especially pleased to be working with such an experienced and passionate international team.” No director, writer, cast or release window has been announced, and no footage exists yet.
A Prequel Is an Interesting Choice
The game everyone remembers is a single very bad day: San Romero High falls to a zombie outbreak and Juliet, a cheerleader from a family of zombie hunters, carves through it with her boyfriend’s severed head on her belt. It is a premise that resolves itself in one afternoon.
Going earlier means the film does not have to re-stage that day shot for shot, which is the trap most game adaptations walk into. It also means the Starling family — the part of the lore the game gestured at and never opened — is the obvious thing to build on. What a prequel gives up is the hook: no severed boyfriend, no chainsaw, or a version of both that has to be re-earned.
Where the Original Came From
Lollipop Chainsaw arrived in 2012 from Grasshopper Manufacture, under Goichi “Suda51” Suda, with James Gunn working on the story and characters years before he was running DC. Tara Strong voiced Juliet. The tone — bubblegum sincerity welded to arterial spray — is recognizably the same instinct Gunn brought to Slither and, later, the Guardians films, and it is the single hardest thing for a live-action version to get right.
Neither Gunn nor Suda51 is among the names attached to the film, and neither was involved in Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, the remaster Dragami released in September 2024, twelve years after the original. Whoever ends up directing this is inheriting a voice rather than being handed one.
The Movie Is Not Arriving Alone
The film landed in the same week as Lollipop Chainsaw 2 Back2Back, announced for PlayStation 5 in 2027 with a playable demo on the Tokyo Game Show floor. Juliet returns to a rebuilt San Romero turned film-industry metropolis called Jaredwood, trapped inside a director’s zombie movie — a premise with enough meta in it that the timing of a real film announcement is either a joke or a plan. Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata is on it. Bloody Disgusting reports an animated series is coming alongside the sequel as well.
The connective tissue is worth noting: Nada Holdings is co-publishing the sequel game and its Joe Teng is producing the movie. This is one company building a franchise on three fronts at once, not three separate licensing deals that happened to land the same week.
Video game horror is having a year — see our review of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, currently rewriting the franchise’s box office records. Everything else on the way is tracked on our upcoming horror movies calendar.