Japanese Horror Filmmaker Takashi Miike Has a Disney+ Series Arriving This Year, But There's A Catch

Legendary Japaneses horror director Takashi Miike has a show coming to Disney+...but only in Korea (at least for now). The filmmaker is rolling out Connect as an exclusive to Disney+ in Korea, with no clear release plan for the U.S. yet. The show, which will premiere in December, stars Jung Hae-in, Go Kyung-pyo, and Kim Hye-jun, and is the first South Korean drama to be produced by a Japanese studio. It is set to premiere at 27th Busan International Film Festival in "Onscreen Section" later this month.

Per the show's Wikipedia page (which is likely more accurate than any translation we can pull from the Korean text -- sorry!), the series is based on a webtoon of the same name, and "depicts a mysterious story that occurs when a man who has been deprived of a part of his body by organ hunters, connects with a person who has received an organ transplant."

You can see the trailer below.

While his actual resume is varied, Miike is best known -- especially in North America -- for his gruesome, horror-tinged movies like Audition and Ichi the Killer. He had a 2006 episode of Masters of Horror that Showtime shelved and never aired over violence concerns, although it did get a DVD release later that year. He also directed 13 Assassins and the live-action adaptation of the manga Blade of the Immortal, which wasn't his best work, but may have been his most mainstream in the West due to the popularity of the comic on which it's based.

Disney+ is a distinctly more family-friendly platform in the U.S. than it is in much of the rest of the world, so it may be a while before this series makes its way to North America. On the other hand, R-rated content is slowly seeping into the Disney+ brand, starting with Marvel movies like Deadpool and Logan. And given the popularity of some of its international content, it feels unlikely Disney+ would give this up to Hulu if the show turns out to be popular in other territories before coming to America.

Do you want to see Connect come to Disney+? Have you read the webcomic, or seen some of Miike's previous groundbreaking work? Sound off in the comments, or yell at @russburlingame on Twitter about all the great Miike movies that should have been mentioned in this article but weren't. 

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