General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Blood: The Last Vampire (2009 film)

Blood: The Last Vampire is a 2009 English-language live-action action-horror film directed by Chris Nahon, adapted from Production I.G's 2000 animated short feature of the same name. It stars the South Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun, credited as Gianna, as Saya, a 400-year-old half-human, half-vampire sword fighter who hunts vampires while posing as a teenager at an American military base in Japan.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Chris Nahon; screenplay by Chris Chow, from characters created at Production I.G³
Lead cast	Gianna (Jun Ji-hyun) as Saya, Allison Miller as Alice McKee, Koyuki as Onigen, with Liam Cunningham, JJ Feild, and Yasuaki Kurata³
Budget	$25.6 million (¥3 billion), financed with France's Pathé⁴
US release	July 10, 2009, limited, by Samuel Goldwyn Films; opened in 20 theaters for $110,029³
Worldwide gross	$5,874,530 per Box Office Mojo; $5,683,954 per The Numbers⁵^•³
Critical reception	23% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (52 reviews); Metascore 28 on Metacritic (13 critics)¹^•⁶
Rating and runtime	R for strong bloody stylized violence; 91 minutes³

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Saya looks like an ordinary teenager but is a centuries-old halfling, born to a human father and a vampire mother, who survives on blood like the creatures she hunts. Sent to an American military base in Tokyo, she works with a shadowy society known as the Council to find demons disguised as humans, and sees a chance to destroy Onigen, the leader of the vampires. Her friendship with Alice McKee, the daughter of the base's commander, becomes a factor in the final confrontation.¹^•⁵

The setting was moved from the source anime's 1966 Japan to 1970 Japan, during the Vietnam War.⁴^•¹⁶

Development and production

Announcement. In May 2006, Bill Kong announced that he was producing a live-action film adaptation of Blood: The Last Vampire, directed by Ronny Yu. At first, Kong and Yu intended to fund the film on their own, but Production I.G gave its official approval in November 2006 and started supplying money for it.⁷ The French company Pathé committed roughly ¥3 billion (about $25.6 million) to the production, and Production I.G licensed its rights in exchange for an undisclosed percentage of royalties on worldwide box office and DVD sales rather than a flat fee.⁴^•⁸

Casting and crew changes. Jun Ji-hyun, the star of My Sassy Girl (2001), was cast as Saya; the film, shot in English and a mix of other languages, was her first non-Korean film, and she adopted the screen name Gianna for it. Yu was retained as producer, but Chris Nahon, director of Kiss of the Dragon, took over as director.⁴^•⁷ The film was shot on film using ARRI cameras, with Hang-Sang Poon as cinematographer and editing by Marco Cavé; Clint Mansell composed the score, and Cory Yuen choreographed the stunts.⁹^•¹⁰ Production countries included France, Japan, and the United States, with Chinese and Hong Kong companies also involved.³

Release and box office

The film opened in Japan on May 29, 2009, grossing $473,992, and rolled out through Asia and Europe in June and July, beginning with Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand on June 4 and the United Kingdom on June 12.⁵ France, where it opened June 17, was the largest single market at $1,374,994.⁵

In the United States, Samuel Goldwyn Films released it limited on July 10, 2009 in 20 theaters, where it earned $110,029 on opening weekend, 42.9 percent of its eventual domestic total, and ran an average of 3.3 weeks per theater.³ Domestic gross was $257,412 by Box Office Mojo's count and $256,682 by The Numbers, about 4.4 to 4.5 percent of the worldwide total; the two trackers put worldwide gross at $5,874,530 and $5,683,954 respectively.⁵^•³ Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released it on video on October 20, 2009, with estimated domestic DVD sales of $2,114,359.³

Reception

Critical response was negative. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 23 percent Tomatometer from 52 reviews, with a critics consensus calling it "a tedious, shoddily acted, amateurish picture that loses all charm in the transition to live-action"; the audience score was 33 percent from more than 50,000 ratings.¹ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 28, labeled generally unfavorable, based on 13 critic reviews, while its user score stood at 6.9 from 34 ratings.⁶ Roger Ebert, who gave it 75 out of 100, wrote that it "isn't a great movie" but called it sincere entertainment that looks good and is atmospheric.⁶ Nick Schager's review in Slant Magazine found the film borderline incomprehensible shot to shot, with nonexistent spatial coherence during combat and sudden jumps in location and time.¹¹

A 2011 analysis published in the Korean journal Manhwa Animation Studies compared the 2009 film with the 2000 animation and concluded that, although the remake faithfully reproduced the original's visual style, including its muted palette of grays and reds, the box office slump could be ascribed to narrative flaws: the heroine's inner conflicts were not convincing, the supporting roles were not probable, and the story was not unique enough.¹²

The source anime and the Blood franchise

The film adapts BLOOD THE LAST VAMPIRE (2000), a 48-minute theatrical anime directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo at Production I.G, notable as an early fully digital anime feature and winner of the Grand Prize in the animation division of the fourth Japan Media Arts Festival.¹³^•¹⁴ In a reversal of typical franchise development, the short animated film spawned the games, manga, novels, and television series of the Blood franchise, including the series Blood+ (2005) and Blood-C, before the live-action remake.⁴ Manga Entertainment sold 120,000 DVDs of the original anime in the United States in 2001, giving the property name recognition there ahead of the remake.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026