Battle Royale

is a 2000 Japanese action-thriller film directed by Kinji Fukasaku, and written by his son Kenta Fukasaku, based on the controversial 1999 novel by Koushun Takami. Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Tarō Yamamoto, and Takeshi Kitano, the film follows a group of junior-high-school students forced to fight to the death by the Japanese totalitarian government. The film drew controversy and was banned or excluded from distribution in several countries; Toei Company refused to sell the film to any United States distributor for over a decade due to concerns about potential controversy and lawsuits, until Anchor Bay Films eventually acquired the film in 2010 for a direct-to-video release.