A school trip ends in the worst classroom imaginable. The first images from Leviathan, Toho's live-action adaptation of Shiro Kuroi's manga, show students in white suits stranded aboard a drifting spacecraft in 2127, where a catastrophic accident leaves the ship low on oxygen with only one working life support system — and the survivors set against each other to claim it.
The first look was shared by Paris-based sales company Goodfellas with Deadline, as Goodfellas prepares to launch international sales on the film outside Asia at the American Film Market. One image shows Shunsuke Michieda's Kazuma Ichinose looking down, his white suit splattered with blood; in another, Kazuma sits beside Natsuki Deguchi's Futaba Nikaido in the ship's cold, tight quarters.
Credit:
Leviathan Film Partners / Shiro Kuroi / Ki-oon
Michieda, known for Even If This Love Disappears From the World, and Deguchi, of Look Back, lead an unusually large young ensemble. An earlier teaser from Toho mostly featured the pair while the rest of the cast stayed blurred behind a red overlay, before a follow-up teaser unveiled the remaining 36 cast members, including Kaito Sakurai, Sakuma Ryuto, Miku Tanaka, Yoko Shogenji and Ikuho Akiya.
Michihito Fujii, who recently took credits on the Netflix hit Last Samurai Standing, directed the film with Ryohei Shingu. Fujii also wrote the script with Izumi Takahashi, adapting Kuroi's best-selling manga, which ran for three volumes from 2024 to 2025.
The manga's path to the screen explains the French connection behind the sales push. Kuroi's series was published in France by Ki-oon, where it became a bestseller, and Leviathan arrives as Toho rides a run of international attention that includes Exit 8 and the Godzilla franchise — the kind of profile that makes a high-concept, dialogue-light survival premise an easy pitch to buyers in other territories.
The film is in post-production, and Goodfellas plans to show buyers a first promotional reel at the market, which runs November 10–15. The premise sits in well-tested territory — classmates forced into a survival contest, in the line of Battle Royale and Squid Game — but moves it off Earth entirely, trading the island arena for a sealed ship where the prize is literally the air itself.
That confinement is also what the stills sell. The pale uniforms and clinical metal of the ship leave the blood nowhere to hide, and with 38 students in the cast, the film has room to let alliances form and break long before the oxygen math resolves itself.
Leviathan opens in Japan on February 11, 2027. No North American release date has been announced, and international plans beyond the market sales push remain unconfirmed.
