movies

Once controversial and now greatly influential, 'Battle Royale' is now in theaters to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

Before there was The Hunger Games and the popular video game genre, the term “battle royale” applied to the popular 2000 film. Director Kinji Fukusaku’s dystopian thriller casts a wide shadow over media these days, and in honor of its 25th birthday in December, it’s coming back to the big screen again.

Based on Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel of the same name, Battle Royale centers on a group of Japanese high school students living under a totalitarian government that’s enacted a yearly game where students fight each other to the death over three days, and anyone who refuses gets their head blown off. At the time, it was controversial enough to get banned or excluded from distribution in some countries, and couldn’t be sold to American distributors for over a decade out of concern for lawsuits. (It eventually did in 2010, albeit as direct-to-video.)