For decades, filmmakers were taught that success meant getting hired to direct the next movie.
Writer, producer and director Dimitri Logothetis believes the more important question is: What do you own?
He is putting that question into production. Nearly four decades after Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Kickboxer became an international martial-arts phenomenon, Logothetis is expanding the franchise beyond live action with Kickboxer: Rebirth, a 3D anime television series combining martial arts, spirituality, magic and a new generation of characters.
“Owning intellectual property was one of the most important lessons I learned in this business,” says Logothetis. “There is an enormous difference between being hired to make somebody else’s intellectual property and controlling a recognized, worldwide property that can continue creating value.”
Rebirth is not an animated remake. The series is designed to keep the authentic martial-arts action that made Kickboxer a worldwide pop-culture favorite, while opening an imaginative universe of ancient spirituality, supernatural powers and new characters.
“Live-action filmmaking is always restricted by budgets,” Logothetis says. “Every elaborate battle, extraordinary environment and supernatural sequence comes with enormous costs. Anime removes those creative limitations. I can take the authenticity of martial arts and combine it with mythology, spirituality and magic to create an entirely new world that would be prohibitively expensive to reproduce in live action.”
Anime as a commercial market — and Kickboxer as an existing brand
The move lands as anime continues its international expansion. According to the Association of Japanese Animations, the worldwide anime market reached approximately ¥3.84 trillion (US$25 billion) in 2024, with overseas markets accounting for about 56.5% of the industry’s total value.
Martial-arts and action anime already show how far a title can travel beyond a television slot. Bandai Namco reported approximately ¥190.6 billion (more than US$1 billion) in annual Dragon Ball-related sales across games, toys and other entertainment products in its fiscal year ending March 2025. Franchises such as Naruto, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen have built enormous international audiences and consumer-products businesses without first arriving as Hollywood film brands.
For Kickboxer: Rebirth, Logothetis argues that existing awareness is the advantage.
“What’s exciting is that we’re not starting with an unknown title,” he says. “Kickboxer has been recognized by martial arts and action fans around the world since 1989. Now we’re introducing that brand to an entirely new generation through one of the fastest-growing forms of international entertainment.”
The series is being developed using advanced proprietary 3D animation technology, with plans for a five-season, 60-episode television franchise. That kind of library, he says, is built for worldwide streaming, international television licensing, merchandise, video games and distribution that can continue for years after the first season.
The Kickboxer case study
The original 1989 Van Damme film began as a low-budget martial-arts picture. Along with Enter the Dragon, it helped define American martial-arts action at a time when major studios largely ignored the genre. Decades later, Logothetis reinvented the property by writing, producing and directing Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016) and Kickboxer: Retaliation (2018). Van Damme returned as mentor, alongside Alain Moussi and combat-sports stars including Dave Bautista, Georges St-Pierre, Gina Carano and Mike Tyson.
Kickboxer: Retaliation holds a 93% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 84% audience score — evidence, the production says, that the reboot reached beyond the original martial-arts core.
Logothetis says the larger opportunity was never simply another sequel. It was the brand.
“My involvement with Kickboxer gave me the opportunity to think beyond a single movie and toward a franchise — feature films, television, animation, gaming, short-form storytelling and other extensions of the IP,” he says. “Creative people sometimes become so focused on the creative side that they forget the word ‘business’ in show business. Understand ownership. Understand rights. Understand the value of what you control.”
Two reboot features are already in the market. Another live-action Kickboxer installment is in development. Rebirth is the next platform, not a replacement for the films.
“I don’t think audiences necessarily experience entertainment that way anymore,” he says. “A story world can exist across multiple forms of entertainment simultaneously.”
A movie property can become an animated property; an animated world can generate a game; short-form content can introduce the brand to consumers who never saw Van Damme in 1989. The commodity connecting them, Logothetis says, is recognition.
“Recognition is incredibly expensive to create,” he says. “There are established properties around the world that audiences already know and have an emotional connection with, but which have been ignored or underutilized.” His advice to entertainment entrepreneurs is therefore counterintuitive: don’t only chase whatever IP is fashionable today. Look backwards.
“There are extraordinary brands, characters, books and entertainment properties that already have awareness,” he says. “The opportunity may be to reinvent one intelligently for a new generation rather than spending enormous amounts of money trying to create recognition from zero. I experienced that first hand with Kickboxer.”
The independent filmmaker as entrepreneur
Logothetis rejects the old split between filmmaker and businessman.
“When you’re making independent films, you’re not only the filmmaker,” he says. “You’re also an entrepreneur.” Independent production, in his telling, is company-building: raising capital, recruiting talent, controlling costs, negotiating rights, managing risk, making a product and finding a market. A screenplay is only the start.
“A good finished screenplay can attract an actor. An actor can help attract financing. Financing allows you to make the film,” he says. “But the unfinished screenplay sitting on your computer can’t do anything.”
He applies the same logic when a plan collapses. Independent films lose financing, actors and distributors as a matter of course. “If financing collapses, maybe you need another financial structure. If an actor becomes unavailable, rethink the casting. If one distributor says no, find another,” he says. “A failed plan is not necessarily a failed project.”
The Kickboxer reboot was built that way: financing, talent, production and distribution assembled without a major studio relaunching the title. He later expanded into original IP with the science-fiction martial-arts film Jiu Jitsu, starring Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage and Tony Jaa. His most recent feature, Gunner (2024), starring Luke Hemsworth and Morgan Freeman, was acquired by Warner Bros. for U.S. release after independent production and has received 48 international festival awards, according to the production.
“You have to continually find ways to make people discover the product,” he says.
That is the job Rebirth is meant to do for Kickboxer now: take a 1989 pop-culture brand, already revived in independent features, into anime, games, merchandise and future live-action — an entertainment universe rather than another single title.
“With Kickboxer: Rebirth, we’re not simply making another television series,” Logothetis says. “We’re building an entertainment universe that can grow through television, games, merchandise and future productions. The original Kickboxer became part of pop culture. Our ambition is to introduce that legacy to an entirely new generation.”
Making the movies is the creative business. Owning the intellectual property can be the long-term business.
Media Contact:
Melanie Marten
The Coup Public Relations
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office@thecoup.de