How anime inspired Michael B Jordan’s career: “These images are burned into my head”
Michael B Jordan’s career has steadily climbed over the past decade, reaching a new peak as the dual lead in Sinners, one of 2025’s most acclaimed films. The New Jersey native began as a young TV actor with standout roles in The Wire and Friday Night Lights, gradually building a strong film résumé with credits including Chronicle, Just Mercy, and Without Remorse.
Of course, it is his ongoing collaboration with director Ryan Coogler that truly set him on the path to leading-man superstardom. The five films they’ve made together – Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Sinners – have seen them form one of the most fruitful director-actor partnerships since Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, and it doesn’t seem like they’re keen to part ways anytime soon.
Coogler was the first director to truly recognise Jordan’s leading man potential, but their collaboration worked both ways. Jordan, inspired by Coogler’s vision and skill behind the camera, began carving out a path of his own in directing. While Coogler helmed the first Creed film before moving on to the Marvel universe with Black Panther, Jordan took on more creative control in Creed II and made his directorial debut with Creed III in 2023, bringing in his own stylistic touches.
While putting together the third instalment of the Adonis Creed saga, Jordan began thinking of ways to set his boxing scenes apart from the ones Coogler had helmed in the first movie, and Steven Caple Jr had handled in part two. He quickly realised that they offered him the perfect opportunity to incorporate elements of something he has been a die-hard fan of since childhood, and that still inspires him to this day: Japanese animation.
Anime, as it is better known, has been a passion for Jordan for so long that he’s been talking about it in interviews for as long as he’s been a star. In fact, when a Twitter user made fun of him for being “an adult man that loves anime,” he responded by quipping, “Goku and Naruto are real ones,” in reference to two of his favourite anime: Dragon Ball Z and Naruto. A few years later, he gave his opinion on the best five anime for newbies to watch as an introduction to the genre: the aforementioned Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, as well as One Piece, Bleach, and Hunter x Hunter.
“I watch anime every day,” Jordan told Polygon. “It’s like these images are burned into my head.”
Therefore, when he began visualising the brutal, highly emotionally-charged boxing scenes in Creed III, images and sequences from his favourite anime couldn’t help but creep into his brain. “It was just second nature to me to reach for that,” he admitted. “There were moments during production where I was like, ‘Where do I infuse these moments?’ I just have a highlight reel of moments from my favorite anime constantly running through my head that, you know, if it makes sense and it fits with the movie, I just pull from that for inspiration.”
The most obvious example of Jordan’s work being inspired by anime comes in Creed III’s final battle, in which both fighters begin the match as it would normally be photographed. However, the arena and the crowd soon fade away, and the two warriors are depicted fighting each other in an impressionistic black void, which heightens the intimacy and emotional intensity between them.
“The void is probably the biggest anime swing I took in this movie,” Jordan acknowledged. “Because as you know, in anime, you’ve got these two main characters who are going at it, right? Usually they go to a quiet place, and it’s usually either all-white or black space, and they’re there just calmly talking about how they feel emotionally.”
The stark contrast between the characters airing their emotional vulnerabilities while “physically trying to take each other’s heads off” is pure anime, as it prioritises character and emotion without concerning itself at all with being “realistic”. That’s something Jordan knew would set his vision apart and he went for it, even if had the potential to alienate viewers unfamiliar with the anime genre.
