Karōshi trailer sends Teo Yoo into a deadly corporate empire

Watch the Karōshi Short on NewsCubby Videos

The chief executive of Ikigai Technologies opens the first Karōshi trailer with a pitch about the company’s influence. The rest of the footage shows what happens when a new recruit named Hiro gets inside. In the near-future action thriller, a worker’s death draws Hiro into a powerful Manhattan corporation, where the loyalty demanded of employees conceals a violent system.

Lionsgate released the trailer on Thursday, November 5. The studio’s YouTube upload had 457,243 views and 5,147 likes when NewsCubby checked at 6:29 p.m. ET that day. Teo Yoo plays Hiro, and the ensemble includes Isabel May, Giancarlo Esposito and Cynthia Erivo. The movie opens in U.S. theaters on February 5, 2027.

What happens in the first Karōshi trailer?

The preview begins with the New York skyline and the Statue of Liberty, familiar landmarks for a movie that changes the rules inside the city. Takehiro Hira plays Vincent Ogawa, the chief executive who addresses an audience about Ikigai and invokes the path of the samurai. His speech establishes a company that expects its people to live by a code, and the images that follow show how quickly that pledge can become a threat.

Hiro enters as a recruit. That gives the film two perspectives on the same institution. Ogawa has a platform and an audience for his account of how the company operates. Hiro has to learn the rules from inside, where the people who enforce them can reach him. ComingSoon identifies the recruit and the executive in its trailer breakdown. Lionsgate’s synopsis frames the story around the outsider’s infiltration after an employee dies.

The trailer sells the idea with a change in how it uses the building. The broad skyline gives way to controlled interiors, and the corporate address gives way to close-quarters violence. Swords turn a phrase from an executive’s speech into a concrete part of the action. The fights belong to the same world as the company’s public pitch, so learning how Ikigai works is part of surviving it.

The preview also cuts from Ogawa’s address to an employee falling to his death, then shows May’s character caught in the immediate aftermath. That choice gives the worker’s death a witness on screen and ties the incident to someone in the ensemble before the trailer turns to Hiro’s infiltration.

TheWrap’s Drew Taylor compared the footage to Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, the 1962 film about a samurai who challenges a powerful clan. The comparison points to a tension the trailer puts front and center. Ogawa uses the language of honor to tell his employees what the company expects of them. Hiro’s arrival puts an outsider in a position to test those expectations. TheWrap also reports that the feature runs 88 minutes.

For viewers following another upcoming science-fiction film, NewsCubby also broke down what the final Dune: Part Three trailer reveals about Paul and Chani.

Who is in the cast, and where have you seen them?

Yoo played Hae Sung in Celine Song’s Past Lives, the A24 drama that follows two childhood friends who reconnect as adults after one of them emigrates from South Korea. That movie asks viewers to read a great deal into a conversation or a hesitation. The Karōshi trailer builds its suspense around a different kind of attention to Yoo’s character. Hiro is taking in his new surroundings, and the audience has to decide how much of what he sees can be trusted.

Hira played Ishido in FX’s Shōgun, where alliances and authority help determine what happens when competing leaders make a move. Ogawa wields power as a chief executive in a speculative Manhattan. Hira’s placement at the start of the trailer gives the audience a chance to hear the logic of that world before the action tests it.

May came to the project after playing Elsa Dutton in 1883 and is also credited in Scream 7. The film’s cast includes Bill Camp, whose credits include Presumed Innocent, and Show Kasamatsu, who appeared in Tokyo Vice. Esposito played Gus Fring in Breaking Bad, a character skilled at presenting a respectable face while running a violent business. Here, the trailer’s main corporate address belongs to Hira’s Ogawa, with Esposito part of the larger ensemble.

Erivo comes to the thriller after playing Elphaba in the two Wicked films. Her screen work also includes Widows, Steve McQueen’s ensemble heist drama, so the jump from a musical to a thriller is a return to territory she has worked in before. NewsCubby recently covered Erivo’s turn as Glinda in the SNL UK Wicked sketch. The official Karōshi trailer puts Erivo and Esposito among the featured cast while using Hiro’s arrival as the audience’s entry into the story.

How did the film come together?

Deadline first reported Yoo’s casting in August 2024, with Doscher already attached to write and direct and Stahelski’s 87Eleven Entertainment producing. Deadline reported May’s casting that November and Erivo’s addition in March 2025. The announcements show how the project took shape around Yoo before the rest of the cast became a prominent part of the trailer campaign.

Doscher previously wrote and directed Only, which played at the 2019 Tribeca Festival. The film stars Freida Pinto and Leslie Odom Jr. as a couple trying to stay together and survive a pandemic. That earlier feature gives a sense of Doscher’s interest in following people inside a wider crisis. Karōshi applies that approach to an outsider navigating a single organization, with the employer and its hierarchy supplying the pressure.

Stahelski directed the four main John Wick films. Here his credit is producer, alongside Jason Spitz, Alex Young and Nathan Kahane. Lionsgate credits the film as an 87Eleven Entertainment production and a True North production. The connection is useful because it locates the action team within a body of work audiences may recognize, while Doscher’s original story starts with a worker and a company that have their own rules.

What does the title mean outside the film?

The International Labour Organization translates karōshi as death from overwork. The term describes an occupational problem. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes a white paper on deaths and injuries from overwork and how to prevent them, following a law enacted in 2014. The report addresses workplace conditions and prevention, while the movie explores its own invented corporation through a thriller plot.

The title gives the trailer’s corporate language an edge. Ogawa’s appeal to loyalty sounds like a virtue from the stage. For Hiro, the cost of that loyalty is the thing he has to investigate. Placing both ideas in the same preview lets the audience hear the institution’s explanation for itself before learning what the outsider finds behind it.

What should viewers watch for next?

February 5, 2027, is the date on the film’s official site. Deadline reported a January 29 opening in June, so older release listings can still show that date. The studio’s current date is the one to use when looking for local showtimes closer to the release.

The first trailer has already established the recruit, the executive and the event that brings them into the same story. A later preview or a fuller cast description could show how May, Esposito and Erivo fit into Ikigai’s orbit. That would give audiences a clearer idea of whether the drama stays close to Hiro throughout or also follows people with a different stake in what he discovers.

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Photo credits

• Teo Yoo, February 19, 2023. Martin Kraft / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped for the article and cropped, text added and animated for the Short. Adaptations retain CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Takehiro Hira, February 20, 2024. Embassy of the United States in Japan / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · U.S. public domain. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short.
• Chad Stahelski, September 19, 2014. Anna Hanks from Austin, Texas, USA / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY 2.0. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short.
• Isabel May, March 12, 2023. 1966Type3 / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY 4.0. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short.
• Cynthia Erivo, February 6, 2025. Kevin Paul / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY 4.0. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short.
• Giancarlo Esposito, March 16, 2024. Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY 2.0. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short.
• Show Kasamatsu, October 8, 2026. Arielaortizb / Wikimedia Commons. Photo source · CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped, text added and animated in the Short. Adapted image retains CC BY-SA 4.0.