Kenji Tanigaki’s Furious Lands Lionsgate Deal After Toronto Run
Kenji Tanigaki’s furious third feature, The Furious, opens globally tomorrow after Lionsgate scooped up the Hong Kong production for international distribution. The pickup follows a Toronto Midnight Madness run in which the film finished second in the People’s Choice voting, a strong result for a slimly plotted but action-crammed martial arts movie.
Toronto Midnight Madness
Second-place in the People’s Choice voting gave The Furious a festival result that travels well beyond the room it played in. Midnight Madness has become a useful proving ground for action titles that rely on momentum, crowd response, and repeatable set pieces rather than prestige signaling, and this one arrived with a clear calling card: hand-to-hand combat, weaponry, and bodily contortions.
The film is a culture-blending Hong Kong production, and that mix is written into the sound as much as the fight design. A good portion of the dialogue is clunkily dubbed in English, while Mandarin, Thai and Tagalog also feature in the film. For a title chasing crossover cult status, that linguistic jumble may be part of the appeal rather than a flaw that needs sanding down.
Xie Miao and Rainy
Xie Miao plays a nameless blue-collar worker stationed in an unnamed country, with Yang Enyou as Rainy, his nine-year-old daughter. Their story is set somewhere in Southeast Asia, but the film uses that geography as a launchpad for a kidnapping thriller, not a map lesson, and the first centerpiece fight scene plays out on the open bed of a moving vehicle.
That sequence sets the film’s terms fast: the father chases a truck in sandals, and the movie keeps tightening around motion, impact, and improvisation. Kensuke Sonomura handled the action choreography, and the result is the kind of barn-burning martial arts movie that can make a distributor’s acquisition look shrewd after the fact.
Lionsgate Pickup
Lionsgate’s international distribution deal gives The Furious a wider route than a festival run alone could provide, especially for a film built on choreography and physical commitment rather than star branding. Tanigaki, working on his third feature, gets a larger audience just as the movie’s noisy mix of dubbing, multiple languages, and stripped-down plotting enters circulation.
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: this is the moment the film stops being a Toronto title and starts becoming a global release. If the crowd response in Midnight Madness is any guide, the business bet is that the action does the selling, even when the dialogue does not.
