Assassination Classroom (live-action)

This feature brings Yusei Matsui's manga to the screen in live action, with a Japanese premiere on March 21, 2015. Its promotional line played on the pun that it was time for the whole class to commit an assassination. Eiichiro Hasumi took the director's chair, and the production leaned heavily on CGI to realize Korosensei, whose post-production work stretched well past the shooting of the student cast.

The film begins with the Japanese military's doomed effort to seize whatever obliterated half the Moon, an operation that wipes out the entire squad. From there Nagisa Shiota explains his own predicament: he has been placed in Class 3-E, the school's dumping ground for delinquents and outcasts and the butt of every joke. In truth that class is a front for a government mission to kill Koro-sensei, the tentacled being blamed for the Moon's ruin, before he makes good on his threat to destroy Earth by graduation. The students must strike with a special knife or BB pellet while simultaneously absorbing his lessons in both academics and killing, aided by the operatives Tadaomi Karasuma and the Serbian assassin Irina Jelavic.

Even as their prime target, Koro-sensei grows close to the class, who come to see him as irreplaceable, and he reveals he took the post to keep a promise. Three newcomers join: Karma Akabane, back from a suspension earned protecting a former 3-E student; Ritsu, an artificial intelligence shaped like a girl; and Itona Horibe, a fellow tentacled being who calls himself Korosensei's blood brother before losing a duel and being spirited away by a hooded guardian. A rival gym instructor, Akira Takaoka, briefly displaces Karasuma until Nagisa is sent to intimidate him out of the school.

When Korosensei offers to let the top scorers in five subjects sever his tentacles, a three-way tie in home economics gives seven students the chance. During the summer they plot the kill and remember their gentle former teacher, Aguri Yukimura. Nagisa's insight into the octopus's aversion to water lets the class bind him, but he escapes by curling into a ball. A vengeful Takaoka then poisons several students and demands Korosensei in exchange for the antidotes. Nagisa and Karma neutralize a tentacle-armed Itona by drawing him into the rain, only to learn Takaoka has taken Kaede Kayano hostage. The class outwits and defeats him without surrendering their teacher. Seeing Korosensei weakened, the government seizes him for a public execution before his devastated students, yet he survives, returns to teaching the following term with Itona now permanently enrolled, and quietly recalls the person behind his promise: Aguri Yukimura.

Casting rolled out in stages ahead of release. Ryosuke Yamada, a member of the idol group Hey! Say! JUMP, was announced as Nagisa in late August, while former KARA singer Kang Ji-young made her acting debut as Irina Jelavic. Weekly Shonen Jump later confirmed that Arashi's Ninomiya Kazunari would voice the CGI Korosensei, and the remaining 3-E roles, including Masaki Suda as Karma, were unveiled through the film's Twitter account. Shooting of the student ensemble was largely finished by mid-October, leaving the tentacle effects as the bulk of the remaining labor.