Creed III star and director Michael B. Jordan has admitted at the Tonight’s Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that the movie has fight scenes which are inspired by anime.

Jordan says he has tried to realize scenes from anime in his live-action movie and that he is an anime nerd. His exact words are:

“It was a gift and a curse. There’s been eight other movies before me. You can shoot a boxing match so many different ways. I think ‘cause I was kind of put in a corner, it kind of forced me to be more creative and really find, like, think outside the box of how to make the fights different. So we shot all the fights in IMAX. And also, I had a huge Japanese anime influence on a lot of my fights. I’m an anime nerd.”

Previously, Jordan had said that the anime which was inspiration for the fights in the threequel movie is Hajime No Ippo. The anime’s boxing and training sequences along with their stylized slow-motion visuals are adapted into the movie.

Morikawa’s Hajime No Ippo began serialization in Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine since October 1989 and has been collected into 135 tankobon volumes as of July 2022. It became the 8th longest running manga series with over 1300 chapters released in Japan as of 2021.

All volumes of the manga were made available digitally for the first time on July 1, 2022.

Source: Jimmy Fallon Show’s Youtube channel