Junji Ito Is Getting Two Live-Action Adaptations This Summer, and One Might Finally Work

Junji Ito adaptations have a losing record. That is not a hot take, it is just the scoreboard. The 2018 Junji Ito Collection was widely written off, Netflix's Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre landed with a shrug in 2023, and Adult Swim's Uzumaki in 2024 became a genuine tragedy when a production that opened with one of the best horror episodes in years visibly collapsed across its remaining three. Fans have learned to greet the words "new Ito adaptation" with a flinch.

So there is something almost funny about getting two at once. At Anime Expo's Junji Ito Masterpiece Collection panel, Global Stage Hollywood and TV Tokyo announced that Strange: Junji Ito's Tales for Sleepless Nights will stream internationally on HBO Max this fall. Meanwhile Netflix's Bloody Smart arrives July 28. Both are live-action. Both are betting that the problem all along was animation.

They might be right.

What Strange actually is

The full Japanese title is Strange -Itō Junji no Yoru mo Nemurenu Kimyō na Hanashi-, and it is a live-action omnibus of 13 stories drawn largely from Ito's 12-volume Masterpiece Collection. It premiered in Japan on TV Tokyo's Drama 24 block on July 3, with a BS TV Tokyo run following July 12. The first two episodes screened at Anime Expo, and HBO Max has it for international audiences around the Halloween window.

The lineup is a proper greatest-hits selection: "Lovesickness," "The Mansion of Phantom Pain," "The Rib Woman," "The Bully," "Face Thief," "A Father's Love," "Memory," "In Old Records," "Penpal," "Further Tales of Oshikiri," "Earthbound," and "Tomio: Red Turtleneck." If you have a favorite mid-tier Ito short, decent odds it is in there.

The title itself is a nice piece of history. It references the original name of the horror magazine where many of Ito's stories first ran, which signals a production that did more homework than picking the scariest titles off a list.

Here is the structural detail that matters most: each of the 13 stories gets its own cast and its own creative team. Directors attached include Atsuhiro Yamada, Yūta Shimotsu, and Ryōta Kondō. This is the Twilight Zone and Masters of Horror model, not a series with one showrunner grinding through an anthology.

Why the format is the whole story

Uzumaki failed for production reasons, but it also failed for structural ones. Ito is a short-story writer. His work runs on a single grotesque idea delivered in twenty pages, escalated past reason, and then cut off before your brain can argue with it. The horror lives in the compression. Stretch one concept across a multi-episode arc and you give the audience time to notice the seams, which is exactly what a spiral-obsessed town cannot survive.

An anthology with a fresh team per story matches the source's actual shape. No one has to sustain anything. Each director gets one idea, one cast, and a limited runtime, and then the show moves on before fatigue sets in. If three of thirteen entries are great, that is a good Ito adaptation, because that is roughly the hit rate of his own collections.

It also spreads the production risk. Uzumaki's collapse was one team failing across one project. Thirteen teams cannot all fall apart the same way.

The live-action argument

This is the first live-action Ito since 2011's Tomio, which makes it a real experiment rather than another lap of the same track.

The case for it is stronger than it looks. Ito's manga panels are static, meticulous, and horrifying precisely because they hold still and force you to look. Animation has to move, and movement is where these adaptations keep dying. A shifting face is scary on the page because it is frozen mid-shift and your eye cannot escape it. Animate that transformation and it becomes a special effect, which is to say a thing you evaluate rather than a thing you fear.

Live-action gets to use real bodies, practical effects, and the specific queasiness of J-horror staging, a tradition Japan is extremely good at. It also cannot cheat. When something wrong has to exist in a real room with a real actor, the production has to actually solve the problem rather than draw around it. Directors like Yūta Shimotsu working in this space is a genuinely promising sign.

The case against is obvious. Ito's best images are anatomically impossible, and impossible things in live-action tend to look like rubber. "The Rib Woman" and "Face Thief" are going to test that hard.

And then there is Bloody Smart

Netflix's entry lands July 28, and it takes the exact opposite approach. Rather than an anthology, Bloody Smart blends several Ito stories into one overarching narrative set in a school town where students experience different terrors after eating a strange fruit.

That framing device is doing a lot of work, and I am skeptical of it. Ito's stories are not designed to connect. Their power comes from arriving without explanation and leaving without resolution, and a shared cause tends to sand that off. Once a fruit explains the horror, the horror has a reason, and a reason is the one thing an Ito story cannot survive. It is the Uzumaki trap in a different costume: taking short-form dread and forcing it into a long-form container.

I would love to be wrong. But if you are only going to be optimistic about one of these, be optimistic about the one whose format matches the material.

What to actually expect

Two shows, one month apart, running the experiment in parallel with opposite methodologies. That is a good outcome for fans regardless of how it shakes out, because we are going to learn something concrete about why these adaptations keep failing.

Bloody Smart on July 28 is the early verdict on whether connective tissue helps or kills. Strange on HBO Max this fall is the real test, and it is the one carrying the better hypothesis: that Ito needs to be adapted the way he was written, in short sharp pieces by people who only have to be great once.

After eight years of near-misses, that is the most encouraging thing about either announcement. Somebody finally looked at the failures and changed the shape of the attempt instead of the budget.