Netflix Released Takashi Miike's New Film Without Telling Anyone

Did Netflix just dump Takashi Miike’s new horror film without any promotion or awareness that it even existed?

“Lumberjack the Monster,” the new film by Miike, arrived on Netflix over the weekend. It’s his first horror movie in over a decade — a genre which he mastered in his greatest works. Netflix didn’t even tell press that they were releasing the film. The only reason folks caught on that a new had Miike dropped was via social media posts.

Here’s The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage:

Netflix released “Lumberjack the Monster” with minimal – perhaps even non-existent – promotion. I only knew about it because I saw a tweet from a guy who had discovered it by accident and couldn’t understand why Netflix hadn’t made more noise about it.

Yes, it was hidden away in a submenu, buried somewhere between the latest C-grade romcom and sex-addicted reality show. This is total disrespect on the part of Netflix, but they couldn’t care less. Why would they? A new Miike doesn’t break the algorithm like a new Lindsay Lohan or Ryan Reynolds flick would.

“Lumberjack the Monster,” based on the 2019 Mayusuke Kurai novel of the same name, stars Kazuya Kamenashi as a psychopathic lawyer seeking violent revenge on a masked axe serial killer.

Miike, 64, is best known for “Audition,” “Ichi the Killer,” “Visitor Q” and “13 Assassins.”