James Gunn's Praise Helps Launch Kenji Tanigaki's Hollywood Breakthrough

Few things accelerate a filmmaker's profile quite like a high-profile public endorsement from someone sitting atop one of Hollywood's most powerful creative chairs. When James Gunn — the architect of the DC Universe's cinematic and television future — takes time out of a packed production schedule to champion a director's work, the industry notices, and so does the rest of the world.

Gunn's Endorsement Carries Real Weight

While overseeing the ongoing production of Man of Tomorrow, Gunn recently attended a screening of The Furious alongside members of his cast and crew, subsequently taking to Threads to share his reaction. He described director Kenji Tanigaki as "one of the best action filmmakers working," adding that the film surpassed even Tanigaki's previous effort, the widely admired Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. That kind of unsolicited, effusive praise from a filmmaker of Gunn's stature — someone whose taste in action and genre filmmaking has informed some of the most commercially and critically successful superhero films of the past decade — functions almost like a letter of recommendation delivered to the entire entertainment industry at once.

What Is The Reckoner?

According to ScreenRant, Lionsgate has since announced that Tanigaki is set to direct The Reckoner, a new action film written and produced by Derek Kolstad, the screenwriter who built the John Wick mythology from the ground up and later contributed to films like Nobody and the MCU's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Peter Dinklage, a performer whose range has never been more apparent than in his recent run of genre-adjacent work — from Wicked to The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes — is attached to star and serve as a producer. The project further unites Lionsgate with AGBO, the production company founded by Anthony and Joe Russo, who are aboard here as producers. The two companies previously joined forces on the upcoming John Rambo film, making The Reckoner a meaningful continuation of that working relationship.

Angela Russo-Otstot, AGBO's Chief Creative Officer, described the project as "original, action-packed, and with genuine soul," noting that Kolstad and Dinklage brought them a world unlike anything they had encountered before. Lionsgate Motion Picture Group president Erin Westerman echoed that sentiment, framing Tanigaki's involvement as part of a broader institutional commitment to discovering filmmakers with singular voices and giving them a stage commensurate with their abilities.

Tanigaki's Track Record

For anyone unfamiliar with Tanigaki's body of work, The Furious offers an accessible entry point. The film follows Wang Wei, an ordinary man who dismantles a criminal empire after his daughter is kidnapped, aided by a journalist whose wife has suffered the same fate. Critically, it has been embraced almost unanimously — a 98% Tomatometer score from 139 reviews and a 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes place it among the most acclaimed action films in recent memory. One review noted that Tanigaki brings "a level of precision and craft" that elevates the material into something genuinely best-in-class, and the film has earned $25.7 million at the international box office.

His résumé also includes Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, which earned him the Hong Kong Award for Best Action Choreography, a prize he had previously claimed for Raging Fire in 2021. His Hollywood footprint, while smaller, stretches back to 2015's Snake Eyes, where he worked as second unit director — a technical role that nonetheless speaks to the kind of exacting physical filmmaking sensibility he brings to every project.

A Convergence of Talent

What makes The Reckoner feel genuinely significant is the convergence of elements it represents: a writer in Kolstad who understands how to build mythologies around taciturn, morally complex protagonists; an actor in Dinklage whose intelligence and physicality are rarely deployed together in action cinema; and a director in Tanigaki who has quietly been redefining what choreographed violence can look like when it is in service of character and story. Gunn's broader influence on DC's creative direction has demonstrated that genuine artistic taste, when exercised from a position of institutional power, can reshape the landscape — and his endorsement of Tanigaki may well prove to be one of the more consequential recommendations of the year.

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