Actor/director visits Japan as part of promotion for Creed III’s Japanese release and its special anime short.

Japan often only gets Hollywood movies months after their overseas release, and that’s true again with Creed III. Though the latest installment in the Rocky spinoff series came out in U.S. theaters all the way back in early March, it won’t be premiering in Japan until later this week.

Japanese moviegoers are going to get a little something special to reward them for their patience, though. In March, word started going around that there was a Creed anime in the works, and while it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a full-blown animated series, an Instagram post by lead actor/director Michael B. Jordan has revealed “We made a special anime as a surprise for Japanese fans that will play at the end of the film.”

Jordan has long been vocal about his passion for Japanese animation, with Creed III containing references to various anime series in its costuming, fight choreography, and storyline. Most notably, there’s clear parallel between the relationships of Creed III’s Adonis and Damian and Naruto’s Naruto and Sasuke, friends turned enemies who just might still be able to reconcile once their battles are done.

So it’s cool to see that while visiting Japan to promote Creed III, Johnson visited the offices of Pierrot, the studio that produced the Naruto anime.

“Actor Michael B. Jordan, who’s known as a big Naruto fan, came to visit us at Pierrot! Naruto character designer Tetsuya Nishio presented him with a shikishi,” tweeted the studio, a shikishi being a thick, stiff paper used for celebrity autographs in Japan.

Like any enthusiastic shonen anime/manga fan visiting Japan, Jordan also stopped by a branch of the Jump Shop, where he posed with a life-size Naruto statue and got some My Hero Academia stickers.

Back on the movie biz side of things, Jordan appeared at a red carpet event at Korakuen Hall, Tokyo’s most fabled boxing venue.

Creed III releases in Japan on May 26, under the title Creed: Kako no Gyakushu, meaning “Creed: The Past’s Counterattack.”

Source, featured image: Twitter/@studiopierrot
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