Jon Hamm Leads New ‘Mindhunter’-Esque Sci-Fi Thriller Set in a Dystopian Future

November 13, 2026

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There’s a short list of working directors whose names alone tell you a movie will be worth watching, even when you know almost nothing else about it, and Takashi Miike has sat on that list for nearly three decades. Despite directing well over a hundred features and giving the world Audition, Ichi the Killer and 13 Assassins, he’s never properly crossed over with American movie stars.

Hollywood keeps borrowing his sensibility while the man himself keeps working in Japan at a pace nobody else can match. That gap might finally be closing, because Miike’s next film has just landed Jon Hamm as its lead, and the premise reads like someone fed Mindhunter and a near-future dystopia into the same script. The project is called Bullfrog, a psychological thriller that Variety broke news of this week as Paris-based mk2 Films boarded international sales heading into AFM.

The setup drops Hamm into a Tokyo of the near future, one sealed under lockdown, where he plays a former FBI profiler working alongside a Japanese detective played by Andrew Koji. The two are chasing a serial killer through the locked-down city in what’s being described as a cat-and-mouse game, which is familiar procedural territory. The Miike factor is what makes it hard to predict. He’s the director who turned a quiet romance into one of the most disturbing horror films ever made with Audition, and if there’s a filmmaker guaranteed not to deliver a standard-issue killer hunt, it’s probably him.

Hamm has spent his post-Mad Men years circling genre material without ever fully committing to it, with Baby Driver and Bad Times at the El Royale as the closest he’s come, and more recently he’s been back in prestige television with Apple’s Your Friends & Neighbors. A Miike serial killer picture is a genuinely different lane for him, and the profiler role plays to the controlled intelligence he does better than almost anyone. Koji, meanwhile, has quietly built one of the more respected action resumes of his generation through Warrior, Bullet Train, and this year’s Street Fighter, where he played Ryu.

Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Andrew Koji as Ryu in Street Fighter
Paramount Pictures

He’s rarely gotten a dramatic co-lead of this size, and pairing him opposite Hamm feels like a deliberate bet on him as more than a martial arts performer. Eric Jordan Baker wrote the screenplay, with Nathan Ross of Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects producing alongside David Styne and Misako Saka. Tokyo-based OLM will oversee the production in Japan, which keeps the film rooted there rather than becoming a runaway Hollywood take on the city. CAA Media Finance is handling North American rights.

Patience will be required either way. Principal photography isn’t planned until summer 2027, which likely puts any release in 2028. For a director who regularly shoots multiple films a year, though, the schedule probably says more about the scale of the production than any hesitation behind it.