Hong Kong superstar and acclaimed director Stephen Chow once offered a blunt piece of advice to Kii Muneyuki, founder of K2 Pictures: Japanese filmmakers should stop imitating kung fu and instead build action films around their own rich traditions of martial arts.
Speaking on Saturday at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei, Kii recalled sharing drinks with Chow in Tokyo on several occasions, during which the comedic icon and visionary filmmaker diagnosed a creative blind spot in Japanese cinema.
“He said, ‘You have karate, judo, jujitsu and kendo. That is Japanese culture. Only you can turn it into action films, so you should be the ones doing it. Stop aping kung fu,’” Kii recounted to the audience.
Kii noted that he entirely agrees with Chow’s assessment, pointing to recent successes like the Netflix sumo drama “Sanctuary” as prime examples of the kind of raw, culturally specific storytelling that resonates deeply because it draws exclusively from Japan’s unique heritage.
The panel, which offered a rare glimpse into the mechanics of modern cross-border financing and distribution, was moderated by filmmaker Huang Yin-yu Kou of Taiwan’s Moolin Films, who is also the founder of the Cinema at Sea – Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival.
As the head of K2P Film Fund I—which notably backed Hirokazu Kore-eda’s live-action adaptation of Fujimoto Tatsuki’s manga “Look Back”—Kii discussed the fund’s impressive financial trajectory and its ambitious slate. The equity round for the fund officially closed at $33 million in February. However, Kii revealed that additional companies have approached K2 regarding investment opportunities since the close. He noted that the round could potentially reopen if existing backers agree, though he has not yet made a definitive decision on whether to pursue that option.
To date, roughly 30 companies have backed the fund, led by MUFG Bank, which stands as Japan’s largest lender. Other heavy-hitting participants include Bandai, Dentsu, the government-backed Development Bank of Japan, and major property firms Tokyu Land and Mori Trust, with Kii serving as the fund’s general partner. This equity is actively being paired with incoming loans that are continuously added, ultimately targeted to total $67 million. Combined, the strategy aims for a total war chest of $100 million designed to finance a target of 50 films over a span of seven years.
During the TCCF session, Kii shared the stage with director Nagata Koto, whose Fukushima-set noir feature “The Nuke Crab” was first unveiled by K2 Pictures at the Cannes Film Market in May. Kii explained that he and Nagata are deliberately aiming for a targeted commercial and cultural impact, looking for a strong reception not just in Japan but also across Eastern Europe—specifically in countries like Poland and Ukraine—where he believes audiences who lived through the shadow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster will naturally connect with the narrative’s themes. The project is currently in active development, with a principal photography shoot targeted for next year.
The film delves deeply into the lives of those who profited from the massive influx of funds that flowed from across Japan into the extensive radiation clean-up efforts of the Tohoku region following the 2011 disaster. Nagata, whose previous feature “Baka’s Identity” competed at the Busan International Film Festival last year, described the subject matter as a severe social taboo within Japan—the exact type of provocative material that productions backed by traditional television networks or major domestic studios would never dare touch.
“When I took it to Kii-san, he immediately said, ‘That sounds interesting, let’s do it,’ and got it started,” Nagata recalled.
This approach forms the backbone of K2’s core international strategy, which the company refers to as a “Japan plus one” market pairing.
“What Americans like about Japan, what the French like about Japan, what Taiwanese audiences like about Japan and what Koreans like about Japan are completely different,” Kii explained. “The Japan that Japanese people like is different again.”
Elaborating on “The Nuke Crab,” Kii noted that while the global public is largely familiar with the broad strokes of the Chernobyl disaster itself, far less is known about the profound ways everyday human lives in the surrounding areas shifted and changed in the aftermath. Nagata added that her overarching creative goal is to secure international sales early enough in the production pipeline so that an overseas release can run concurrently with the domestic Japanese launch. She emphasized that universal, shared human emotions—such as friendship, family bonds, jealousy, and love—can easily bridge cultural gaps and make an unfamiliar or localized setting feel close to home.
“I think jealousy and love are the same anywhere in the world, as long as we are human,” Nagata said.
K2 Pictures was originally founded as a deliberate alternative to Japan’s deeply entrenched production committee system. Under the traditional committee model, domestic films are structured and financed primarily with the local market in mind, often limiting creative risks and international ambitions. Kii, whose extensive industry background ranges from tearing cinema tickets and making popcorn to rising through the ranks as a producer at Toei, argued that the historically closed nature of that traditional system effectively locked out foreign and outside institutional investment. In turn, this structural rigidity made it exceptionally difficult to return meaningful profits back to the creators responsible for the content.
Operating under a dramatically different model, profits at K2 are calculated strictly on a title-by-title basis. Under their revenue-sharing framework, 70% of the returns go directly to the financial investors, while 30% goes to the creative side.
“Producers and the people involved in making the film aren’t putting up money, but the film exists because of their creativity,” Kii noted.
The company has maintained a swift pace, completing six films over the course of the year. This active slate includes not only Kore-eda’s “Look Back,” which competed at the prestigious Venice Film Festival, but also Son Myung-ah’s debut feature “Trophy,” which is slated to open in South Korea. While Kii stated that the company’s internal goal is to maintain a steady output of six or seven releases per year, he candidly admitted that after a year in operation, maintaining that rigorous pace is “pretty tough.”
To support its slate and ensure proper global exposure, K2 has established physical outposts in both Taiwan and South Korea with the explicit goal of distributing its films directly in those vital markets. Kii pointed out that roughly 99.9% of Japan’s overseas film business currently relies entirely on traditional licensing deals—a hands-off approach that he argued does very little to actively build or raise the long-term commercial value of Japanese titles abroad.
“Japanese people taking Japanese films to that place and promoting them hard there – I think that’s what raises their value,” he said.
Greenlighting decisions at K2 rest collectively with its core team of six or seven producers, including Kii himself. He emphasized that he maintains a policy of not blocking any project that a producer is passionately committed to, provided it passes a fundamental test: whether production costs can be realistically balanced against likely future revenues.
“Nobody can tell whether a film will be a hit,” Kii acknowledged.
According to Kii, that pragmatic rule applies equally across both arthouse and commercial projects. “If it’s only going to bring in JPY50 million ($330,000), make it for JPY20 million ($130,000),” he later told the session attendees.
The exact same risk-mitigation logic is applied when working with first-time filmmakers. Kii explained that producers can proactively line up pre-sales, streaming rights agreements, and corporate sponsorships so that a debut feature is structurally protected from losing money. Safeguarding new directors from catastrophic financial failure is vital, he noted, because a massive opening-film loss often effectively bars a director from ever securing financing for a second feature.
“I want to keep launching new directors from K2 Pictures,” Kii said. “And I want them to be grateful for the rest of their lives. Don’t forget us when you make it big.”
Beyond production and distribution, Kii harbors legislative ambitions for the industry. He recounted conversations with a British entertainment lawyer and an American completion bond executive, both of whom pointed out that the entertainment business fundamentally operates much like real estate: producers create intellectual property assets and subsequently turn those assets into cash. While Japan successfully passed a specialized investment trust law around the year 2000 that allowed real estate to be efficiently securitized, that legal framework notably fails to cover creative content. Kii revealed that he has already begun discussing the urgent need for similar legislative reform with legal experts and intends to actively push for a new legal framework in Japan.
