Bonus: Battle Royale was wild, but Battle Royale II didn't have to hand it to 'em

Ever wonder why you don't hear a lot about BRII? It's cause the heroes are terrorists

(Statue of limitations on these two 20-year-old films: full spoilers. I watched these movies on the Criterion Channel, which has recently been giving me a lot of enlightenment.)

Back at Otakon my buddy Carl ran a panel on Train Man (Densha Otoko), a Japanese internet fiction phenomenon¹ that spawned a pile of multimedia retellings— a movie, a TV series, multiple manga aimed at different demographics— and quickly disappeared. It got me thinking of the forgotten 00’s.

And you know what was a big deal in the early 2000s? Battle Royale.