Altered Carbon Writer Takes On Samurai Spirits Film for The Arena
Laeta Kalogridis, the writer and showrunner behind Netflix's sci-fi series Altered Carbon, will write a film adaptation of the fighting game Samurai Spirits for The Arena, The Hollywood Reporter reported on 22 October 2026.
A showrunner is the person who runs a series day to day, from scripts to the staff who make it. Kalogridis will take on the writing of the film.
Samurai Spirits is a one-on-one fighting game set in feudal Japan. It first reached arcades in 1993, and it went on to spawn a long line of sequels. The most recent entry is Samurai Shodown, released in 2019.
The Arena is a production company run by Erik Feig. SNK, the company behind the game series, provides financial backing for the company's projects. That link is what ties the new film to the games' owner.
Kalogridis has a long résumé in big-screen work too. Her credits include Avatar and Terminator Genisys. In 2016, Deadline reported that Skydance Media had acquired global live-action rights to the anime series Sword Art Online, and that Kalogridis would write the pilot episode and serve as an executive producer on it.
The Samurai Spirits film is one thread in a wider set of SNK-linked projects. David S. Goyer is writing a Fatal Fury movie for The Arena. Grant Singer is developing a standalone prequel called Geese that focuses on the villain of the Fatal Fury games. A separate animated series, Fatal Fury: The Vow, is in the works with Skybound, the comic and television company led by Robert Kirkman.
For fans of the games, the spread is wide. In June 2026, Yahoo Entertainment reported that The Arena was developing Art of Fighting into movies, shows, anime and manga. Each format is a separate route from the same game world to a different audience.
Video game adaptations have been a steady source of projects in Hollywood for years, and this slate shows a company working across several titles at once. For a general reader, the simplest way to read it is this: a single game can become a film, a series, a cartoon and a comic, each written and financed by different people. Nothing in the announcements sets a release date for any of them.
