General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Gintama (銀魂) (2017 film)

Gintama (銀魂) is a 2017 Japanese live-action comedy-action film directed and written by Yuichi Fukuda, adapting the Benizakura arc of Hideaki Sorachi's manga Gintama. It stars Shun Oguri as the samurai Gintoki Sakata, who runs an odd-jobs business in an alternate-history Edo where aliens called the Amanto have opened the country and samurai are in decline. Warner Bros. Pictures released the film in Japan on July 14, 2017, with a running time of 131 minutes and a general-audience rating from Eirin.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	July 14, 2017 (Japan), distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures; 131 minutes; rated G by Eirin¹^•²
Director and writer	Yuichi Fukuda, known for the television comedy series Yūsha Yoshihiko¹
Source material	The Benizakura arc of Hideaki Sorachi's manga, serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump since 2003, with over 51 million collected volumes in print²^•⁴
Main cast	Shun Oguri (Gintoki Sakata), Masaki Suda (Shinpachi Shimura), Kanna Hashimoto (Kagura)¹
Japanese box office	3.84 billion yen, first among 2017's live-action Japanese films and third overall for the year⁵
Worldwide gross	$45,746,967, including $33,269,878 in Japan and $12,232,143 in China⁶
Follow-ups	A dTV original drama spin-off streamed from July 15, 2017; a sequel film, Gintama 2: Rules Are Made to Be Broken, opened August 17, 2018⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film is set in the late Edo period of a parallel world in which the Amanto, aliens who arrived from space, forced the country open and took power, and a sword ban has left the samurai in decline.³ Gintoki Sakata, once feared as the "White Yaksha" (Shiroyasha) among the anti-foreigner resistance, now runs the odd-jobs shop Yorozuya Gin-chan with Shinpachi Shimura, son of a fallen sword school, and Kagura, a girl of the battle-loving Yato tribe.²^•⁴

The plot follows the manga's Benizakura arc, an early and popular storyline. A killer wielding a mysterious cursed sword stalks Edo; Gintoki's old comrade, the resistance fighter Katsura Kotaro, falls to the blade and disappears, and the investigation of the murders leads Gintoki, Shinpachi, and Kagura into a conspiracy behind the events.²^•¹ The conspiracy traces to Shinsuke Takasugi, a former comrade of Gintoki's, played by Tsuyoshi Domoto.²^•²⁰

Franchise

The film launched a series. A dTV original drama with the same cast and staff, adapting popular episodes of the manga, began exclusive streaming on July 15, 2017, the day after the film's release.⁷ A sequel film, Gintama 2: Rules Are Made to Be Broken, opened on August 17, 2018 and earned 3.7 billion yen in Japan, ranking fifth among 2018's Japanese releases.⁸^•¹⁹ Further spin-off dramas followed in 2018, and the recommended viewing order for the series runs film (2017), drama Gintama: Mitsuba Arc (2017), film Gintama 2 (2018), and drama Gintama 2: Yonimo Kimyo na Gintama-chan (2018).⁸

Production

Getting the rights. The manga's distinctive mix of science fiction, period drama, and parody had discouraged earlier live-action proposals, and Sorachi had turned down every project that reached him.⁹ Producer Shinzo Matsuhashi, a former WOWOW employee with more than twenty film and drama credits including Rurouni Kenshin, initially thought the property too risky to pitch, and Shueisha told him a live-action version would be difficult.¹⁰ The turning point was Fukuda himself: when his Yūsha Yoshihiko series aired, many viewers posted on Twitter asking him to adapt Gintama, and when the proposal reached Sorachi, he reportedly said Fukuda might be able to do it.¹⁰ Matsuhashi brought the idea to Fukuda, who wrote a script with him, and after several exchanges the project was formally approved.¹⁰

At their first meeting Sorachi greeted Fukuda with "we've been waiting for you," teased him with questions such as whether Elizabeth would be made of cardboard, and gave him broad freedom, saying he could make whatever changes would make today's audiences laugh since comedic trends change.⁹ Sorachi also sent a cynical blessing during production, writing that however luxurious the cast, "the original is the original, so basically a sinking ship," a remark Fukuda said moved him to tears.⁹

Schedule and casting. The first draft of the script was completed in March 2016, the live-action adaptation was announced on July 1, 2016, and filming began on July 3, 2016 at the Toei Tokyo studio in Nerima, Tokyo.⁹^•¹¹ The casting of Oguri, Suda, and Hashimoto was settled smoothly, and further cast announcements followed in August and September 2016: Masami Nagasawa as Tae, Masaki Okada as Katsura, Yuya Yagira as Toshiro Hijikata, Ryo Yoshizawa as Sogo Okita, Kankuro Nakamura as Isao Kondo, Tsuyoshi Domoto as Takasugi, Hirofumi Arai as Okada Nizou, and others.⁹^•¹¹^•²⁰

Approach. Fukuda said he had no interest in making "his own Gintama"; as a fan, his aim was to reproduce the manga's appeal faithfully in live action, and he acknowledged that Sorachi's comic sensibility resembled his own.¹² The production built the mixed science-fiction and period-drama world with detailed art direction, and Fukuda identified the speech quirk of Kagura, the strongest warrior girl in the universe, as his biggest worry.⁹ The film layers Fukuda's own parodies and improvised gags on top of the original's humor, and the marketing slogan was "the stupidest samurai in the universe, damn it!!"⁴^•²

Reception and box office

The film earned 3.84 billion yen in Japan, ranking first among 2017's live-action Japanese films and third in the overall 2017 Japanese box office.⁵ Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of $45,746,967, all international: $33,269,878 from Japan (opening July 15, 2017 with $6,371,634), $12,232,143 from China (released September 1, 2017), and smaller totals from South Korea, Australia, Thailand, and New Zealand.⁶ A JETRO report on Japanese films released in China in 2017 lists Gintama at 81.16 million yuan, the top live-action Japanese film there that year.¹³

Critical reception split along familiarity with the source. On Rotten Tomatoes the film held a 20% Tomatometer from five critics against a 72% audience score.¹⁴ The South China Morning Post's James Marsh gave it 2 of 5 stars, calling it "an exhausting and alienating experience for the uninitiated" despite its visual energy.¹⁵ Japanese reviewers praised the casting's fidelity to the original and the acrobatic swordplay while faulting the length and the thinness of the dramatic scenes; the three Cinema Today writers averaged three stars, with one calling it a "character festival" with a high reproduction rate and another finding the two-hour-plus runtime too long.¹⁶ Later surveys of the film's reputation describe the same divide: criticism of gag pacing and interpretation of the original against praise for the cast's resemblance to the characters and the faithful recreation of the manga's atmosphere.⁸

Adaptation choices

The film follows the anime film Gintama: The Movie: Benizakura Arc - A New Retelling Shinsengumi Crisis as its base, but because a live-action release was expected to draw far more first-time viewers than the anime, it explains characters and settings that the anime version had left unexplained for existing fans, requiring substantial restructuring within the limited runtime.¹⁷ Matsuhashi said the Benizakura arc was fixed at the script stage: an early, popular storyline was needed, and the sword plot gave the film a vertical spine onto which Fukuda's gags could be scattered.¹⁰

The film also carries the manga's self-aware humor into its own framing. Reviewers noted that characters repeatedly say the word "live-action" in the film and compare their own adaptation to other failed manga adaptations, a meta structure that one analysis identified as touching the core of what makes Gintama itself.¹⁶^•¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026