What are the City Hunter live-action movies?

Ryo Saeba has been filmed on four continents’ worth of sets, and for thirty years, never officially in Japan. The first attempt was Hong Kong’s: the 1993 City Hunter, directed by Wong Jing, with Jackie Chan as Ryo and Kumiko Goto as Kaori. Chan dislocated his shoulder making it and has criticised the film himself; it remains a famous, argued-over artefact, a martial-arts comedy wearing a manga’s name.

Hong Kong had already borrowed the character twice without asking: Saviour of the Soul (1991) uses City Hunter’s cast with its plot changed, and Mr. Mumble (1996) took the concept and changed the names. Korea reworked the premise entirely for a 2011 SBS television drama with Lee Min-ho and Park Min-young, a revenge story that keeps little but the title and the hero’s name.

France, the country that loves him most outside Japan, made its tribute in 2019 (see the Nicky Larson page). And Japan finally filmed its own: the Netflix film of April 25, 2024, directed by Yuichi Sato, with Ryohei Suzuki as Ryo and Misato Morita as Kaori, the first Japanese-produced live-action City Hunter. It opened at No. 1 on Netflix’s global chart for non-English films, reached the top ten in 32 countries and regions, France among them, and closed, inevitably, with “Get Wild Continual”.