This comes out in theaters May 12th.

Sean Bean and Famke Janssen? What is this, a 1990s James Bond movie?!

Saw the trailer for this a while back. It looks like a fan film that lucked out in getting Famke Janssen and Sean Bean. Didn't know they roped Mark Dacascos in this too.

I can't watch Famke Janssen anymore. A beautiful woman who ruined her face.

I could see watching this down the road, on disc or streaming, but it doesn't look exceptional. I don't know much about the original anime, other than having heard of it and seeing pictures through the years. Nice to see an Asian-American in the lead although from what I've read the characters in the anime aren't specifically Asian. He's Sonny Chiba's son, and also had a role in two live action FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST adaptations recently. The borderline DTV cast does raise an eyebrow. Looks like the director only has short films under his belt, so I guess his producer status from THE WITCHER allowed him to make this? The CGI looks no better or worse than everything else nowadays; I've grown accustomed to that by now.

It was called "Saint Seiya" in Japan and then when it aired on American TV, it was called "Knights of the Zodiac" and they used that for the DVD release also. I saw the original series (I forget the date) and the movie spin-offs and I remember a connection with Greek Gods, but not with the Zodiac, so I think the retitling was a poor choice.

All the knights/saints are tied to zodiac signs/constellations. The main heroes are "bronze saints" who are named after Greek constellations like Pegasus, Cygnus/swan, Dragon, Andromeda and Phoenix (basically the original 48 constellations Ptolemy named). There are silver saints as well but for that first arc the top of the chain and the big bads are the gold saints, based off of... the constellations of the Zodiac.

In other countries they changed the name of the position the characters hold from "Saint" to "Knight" (or Chevalier or Caballero) for probably obvious reasons, which is probably what prompted the name change. It was also hugely popular in Mexico and France under that name. As ultra violent as it was it wasn't adapted to the US until the 90's anime boom and by that time it was probably too dated to really make an impact.

Having said that, and obviously being a fan of the series, I don't hold high hopes for this based on what we've seen so far, but we'll see.

I had a Colombian coworker years ago and he would tell me that Saint Seiya was practically as big as Dragon Ball Z (which was also huge, obviously) in LATAM.

Looks like this is surprisingly getting a decent wide release this weekend.

Mackenyu is also going to be Zoro in Netflix's live action One Piece so he's basically been in Rurouni Kenshin, Fullmetal Alchemist and now One Piece (and actually looking at his resume he's been in Chihayafuru, Peach Girl, a Jojo movie, Tokyo Ghoul and Kaiji, and a Kamen Rider Drive movie).

Hopefully this and One Piece don't kill his career. (I do really want both to be good but the chances that they are...)

The original Japanese title : 聖闘士星矢, is a bit more complicated in actual description. The main character's name is just directly translated so no confusions there. The actual meaning of the first three kanji characters would be something like "holy warrior", "saintly gladiator", or "saint fighter", depend on which combination of words you feel are more appropriate. But to make it short and catchy they just called it "Saint Seiya".

Isn't it said like "seinto" though? Or did it become so attached to Seiya that it changed over time or something? Either way there's a basis with the pope character in the Catholic Church and I'm sure they wanted to avoid those connotations considering the series is about Greek (and sometimes Norse) gods.

Sony Pictures reportedly is cancelling screenings due to underperforming presales. If you have tickets, it's probably a good idea to call your theater before going.

Yup. Most of my local theatres that had listings for it have dropped it. I was surprised to see it getting a bigger release... so not a huge shock.

Wait, it's basically so bad they pulled it from theaters last minute? Like they'd rather show a weeks old movie that was scheduled to come out of theaters than show this or something, or do they just show nothing?

It’s still playing, but they pulled a lot screens.

When I went to Wondercon a few months ago, this was heavily promoted there by Sony. I’m a little surprised they’ve basically written this off as a bomb before it even plays.

Not surprised. This has ZERO big name stars. No way something like this would open big with just a cast of familiar character actors. Also, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is in theaters. This has/had streaming written all over it.

I guess I'm just surprised they pulled screens, what is shown in it's place? Is Sony paying for those screens or are they just trying not to be completely embarrassed? This is probably a common occurrence but just seems so last minute.

It's changed to a limited release. The distributor doesn't pay for screens. The theatres will just adjust their screening times of other movies...add another showing, etc.

Recent interview with co-producer, Miguel Ángel Faura