Edward Zwick’s 2003 historical epic The Last Samurai has quietly climbed into HBO Max’s most-streamed movie chart in the U.S., giving the Tom Cruise film a surprising second run more than twenty years after it first hit theaters.
That timing makes sense. FX’s 2024 breakout Shōgun is still driving a lot of the conversation, and it’s easy to see why people are circling back to older samurai stories. In The Last Samurai, Cruise plays Capt. Nathan Algren, a Civil War veteran carrying deep trauma who’s hired to train the Emperor’s modern army during the Meiji Restoration. From there, the film moves into bigger territory: honor, identity, cultural upheaval, and the collision between modernization and the samurai way of life.
And if Shōgun left you wanting more Hiroyuki Sanada, there’s another reason to revisit it. Sanada plays Ujio in The Last Samurai after leading FX’s 2024 hit Shōgun as Toranaga. He also worked as a consultant on The Last Samurai and later served as a producer on Shōgun.
The movie still holds up as a star-powered spectacle, and it also captures a particular moment in Hollywood’s changing relationship with Japanese stories. It reportedly pulled in $450 million worldwide, sits at 65% with critics and 83% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and still gets credit for its scale, cinematography, costumes, emotional sweep, Ken Watanabe’s Oscar-nominated performance, and Cruise’s more restrained turn. At the same time, it continues to draw criticism for its historical liberties and its white-savior framing.
You can stream The Last Samurai now on HBO Max in the U.S. and on MGM Plus.
Author: Emmanuel Pina
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