Hideo Kojima’s worked out exactly how he wants to die: Kicking the popcorn bucket

Hideo Kojima sure has been thinking about death a lot lately. Though he’s a pretty spritely 62 years old, the Metal Gear and Death Stranding creator has made our pages recently for things like: talking about deciding to make Physint after a brush with death in 2020, making a game where you get old and die, and how he has a USB stick full of ideas that he will one day leave to his staff that is “‘kind of like a will”.

Well, here’s one more for the pile: Kojima knows how he wants to die. In a post on X (translated by Genki_JPN), Kojima said that—when the time comes—he wants to kick the popcorn bucket. No, really, he wants to die in a cinema: “I’m someone who’s always thought when I die, I want to die in a movie theater.”

Like a man who’s spent most of his life directing videogames down to their last detail, Kojima’s got the whole thing mapped out in his mind. “I like the time before the movie starts the best,” he says. “Enter the movie theater, the lights turn off, the commercials and trailers play, then just before the movie starts is when I want to pass away.” Probably not a fun time for the guy who comes in to clean up the seats and finds him, but there’s nothing to be done about that.

You’ve gotta admit, it’d be a fitting end. If you know anything about anything about Kojima, then you know the man is absolutely film-obsessed. He tries to watch a film every day, and his (English-language) bio on social media has been “70% of my body is made of movies” for as long as I can remember.

It’s his bio in his own games, too. You can recruit Kojima as a soldier in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. His description? “70% of my existence is made of movies. It’s up to you to decide what to do with the remaining 30%.”

And if you’re thinking, ‘You should go make a movie yourself, Kojima,’ then good news, he is. Kojima Productions is collaborating with A24 on a Death Stranding movie, which Kojima says intends to “present a new dimension of cinematic adaptation that goes beyond merely turning a game into a live-action movie”. Well, that’ll be good. Someone should keep an eye on him at the premiere, though.