Will There Ever Be a Ninja Scroll 2?

Start with what is not a sequel. Ninja Resurrection was sold in North America as Ninja Scroll’s follow-up; it is an unrelated adaptation of a Futaro Yamada story by a different studio, wearing a borrowed name. The genuine continuation of Jubei’s story on screen is the television series: Ninja Scroll: The Series, thirteen episodes made at Madhouse in 2003, directed by Tatsuo Satō with Kawajiri credited as original creator, following Jubei, the thief Tsubute and the priestess Shigure through the affair of the Dragon Stone. Discotek brought it to Blu-ray in 2020. There was also a Western comic: Wildstorm’s twelve-issue Ninja Scroll by J. Torres, from 2006.

The sequel film itself has a paper trail a decade long. Madhouse announced in August 2008 that an official sequel was in the works with Kawajiri returning to write and direct. In February 2014, Madhouse chief executive Hiroyuki Okada confirmed that Kawajiri had finished the script in May 2013, reported under the title Ninja Scroll Kocho, and that production would begin when financing was secured. He was blunt about the obstacle: investors were hard to find because the original had not been a big hit in Japan. Nothing followed; by 2019 the project was described as in limbo.

Hollywood tried its own version. In October 2008 Warner Bros. took the live-action rights, with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way producing alongside Madhouse and screenwriter Alex Tse, of Watchmen, hired to write. That film was never made either.

Then, movement. At the Annecy festival in June 2026, Singapore studio Kasagi Labo announced a new Ninja Scroll project, listed by Cartoon Brew as a film, with Masao Maruyama, a producer of the 1993 original and a co-founder of both Madhouse and MAPPA, serving as special creative advisor. It is an announcement, not a production: no director, no date, no footage. But after thirty-three years, it is the first sequel news that is not a rumour. This page will be wrong someday, and it will be glad to be.