Shin Ultraman Reveals New Cast Additions

After bringing a new life to Toho's Godzilla franchise with the critically and commercially successful Shin Godzilla, the creative team behind that project will be taking on another giant warrior. Tsuburaya Productions is teaming up with Toho and Studio Khara for a new take on the Ultraman franchise will Shin Ultraman. Currently slated for a release in 2021, there's not much known about the drastic changes this new film will make to the Tokusatsu icon. But the cast for the new film is starting to come together.

Joining the previously confirmed Takumi Saitoh (as the main character transforming into Ultraman), Masami Nagasawa (as the main character's partner), and Hidetoshi Nishijima are a new slate of actors with currently unconfirmed roles as of this writing. They include Koji Yamamoto, Tetsushi Tanaka, Daiki Arioka, Akari Hayami, Ryo Iwamatsu, Toshihiro Wada, Toru Matsuoka, Kyusaku Shimada, Keishi Nagatsuka, and Hajime Yamazaki

Studio Khara previously announced that the Shin Ultraman reboot film is currently on track for a release some time in 2021, with TOHO distributing the film in Japan upon release. There are currently very few details as to the film's plot, and that's why many of the new actors and cast additions are still very mysterious.

Neon Genesis Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno is currently attached to write the script, and the first draft was completed earlier this year. Anno will be putting his full attention into the new Ultraman film after the release of the fourth Evangelion film, Evangelion 3.0 + 1.0, which will be launching in Japan on June 2020. So expect the film's progress to continue even further as we get into 2020.

Tsuburaya Productions previously announced their effort to make their properties more recognizable to a wider variety of fans through new projects. This has included an anime series for Gridman the Hyper Agent, a proposed live-action Ultraman reboot produced in the United States, and most recently an anime rebooted take on the franchise released on Netflix. This new Netflix anime is based off of Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shiguchi's ULTRAMAN manga, which is a sequel to the original 1966 Ultraman television series.

The first season is currently available for streaming in both Japanese with English subtitles and English dub, and runs for 13 episodes. Popular enough to garner a second season, which is currently in the works, Netflix officially describes ULTRAMAN as such, "Several years have passed since the events of Ultraman, with the legendary "Giant of Light" now a memory, as it is believed he returned home after fighting the many giant aliens that invaded the Earth. Shin Hayata's son Shinjiro seems to possess a strange ability, and it is this ability, along with his father's revelation that he was Ultraman, that leads Shinjiro to battle the new aliens invading the Earth as the new Ultraman."

via Mantan Web