Mike Fleming

UPDATE: I originally posted a trailer for this movie that I found on Youtube, and the Deadline commenters have spent the day beating it like it owed them money. The producers have appealed to my sense of fair play because, they said, the trailer was an early sales tool that doesn’t reflect the quality of the finished film. So I’ve pulled the trailer.

EXCLUSIVE: ARC Entertainment is teaming with Barry Gordon’s XLrator Media to acquire U.S. distribution rights to Bunraku, the Guy Moshe-directed martial arts action film that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last fall. The film stars Josh Hartnett, Ron Perlman, Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Kevin McKidd, Jordi Molla, Gackt Camui and Shun Sugata.

Hartnett plays a mysterious drifter who arrives in town the same time as a young Japanese warrior (Gackt). The town has been poisoned by criminal elements, and each man moves along toward separate missions, advised by the bartender (Harrelson) at the Horseless Horseman Saloon. Eventually the two strangers team to take on the town kingpin (Perlman) and his femme fatale companion (Moore). The film’s produced by Snoot Entertainment’s Keith Calder and Jessica Wu, along with Picturesque Films’ Nava Levin, and Ram Bergman. Production designer Alex McDowell co-produced. Calder and Wu are producers on the Morgan Spurlock documentary POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. “Bunraku’s visually dazzling world melds Samurai films, spaghetti westerns, gangster movies and graphic novels in a way audiences have never seen before,” Gordon said. “Plus, the fight scenes kick ass.” The aim is to release theatrically later this year.