New Netflix anime movie Ultraman: Rising comes from a nearly 25-year-old idea from its director: "I never thought there would be any way I could get the rights to the characters"

Ultraman may be unfamiliar to some but, to many in Japan, the alien superhero - first introduced in 1966's Ultra Q – is an icon.

That decades-long history has spawned countless TV shows, movies, and video games. It even inspired director Shannon Tindle to come up with his own original idea, one that would become the basis for a new Netflix movie almost a quarter of a century later.

"I never thought there would be any way I could get the rights to the characters and at that time, I couldn’t have," Tindle tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which features Doctor Who on the cover, of Tsuburaya Productions’ ongoing rights battles.

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Despite the legal roadblock, Tindle sketched detailed concept art alongside the script and – years later – received a call from Netflix about turning his project (then titled Made in Japan) into an Ultraman movie.

"I said, 'Well, nerd me is very excited by that. But producer/ director me wants to make a movie that I want to make,'" he remembers. "They said, 'We support that whether it’s going to be Ultraman or not – we want to make the movie.'"

Ultraman: Rising follows Ultraman (in this iteration, a baseball star named Ken Sato) as he juggles his world-saving duties with baby kaiju, Emi.

One of Tindle's great hopes is that audiences fall in love with Emi, just like he did conceptualising her back in 2001. "She’s got a touch of Looney Tunes, a smidge of ’70s Japanese kids shows, and a lot of my daughter when she was a toddler," he says of his inspirations. "One of the greatest rewards from early screenings has been watching how people connect with Emi on a personal level. That’s an incredible feeling."

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Ultraman: Rising releases on Netflix on June 24. The above is just a snippet from our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who on the cover and is available from Wednesday, May 15. See what you should be looking out for on newsstands below...

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