When it comes to discussing the PIRANHA franchise, the focus is often on more familiar names like Roger Corman, Joe Dante, John Sayles, James Cameron, and Alexandre Aja. However, there is one person who has been involved with every single entry in the PIRANHA series, the person who holds the rights: Chako van Leeuwen, a.k.a. Hisako Tsukaba. A retired actress, Tsukaba (with Jeff Schechtman) brought the PIRANHA project to Corman in the first place, and since then she has earned a producer, co-producer, or executive producer credit on PIRANHA '78, PIRANHA PART TWO: THE SPAWNING, PIRANHA '95, PIRANHA 3D, and PIRANHA 3DD.
After teaming up with American and Italian production companies to get those English-language films made, Tsukaba is now, for the first time, setting up a PIRANHA project in her native Japan.
It's not exactly clear what we should refer to this Japanese PIRANHA movie as. On Tsukaba's IMDb page, it's listed as PIRANHA JPN. On the official website of Tsukaba's company IXFilm Group Inc., it's listed as SUMMER OF THE PIRANHA.
Whatever the title is, it looks like (judging by the concept art for the movie) it's going to be featuring piranha that are quite large. That's the sort of fish I expected to see causing trouble in the sequel to PIRANHA 3D.
PIRANHA JPN / SUMMER OF THE PIRANHA is said to be in pre-production, aiming for a 2018 release. We'll keep you updated as the project moves forward. Here's hoping it will be filming soon, because I would love to add a Japanese-language spin-off into my PIRANHA collection.
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