Kojima Loved Whalefall So Much It Ruined Squid For Him

Ever walked out of a movie so intense it changed how you feel about food? That's exactly what happened to Hideo Kojima after watching Whalefall.

The Metal Gear Solid creator and full-time movie buff shared his thoughts on the film over the weekend, and his verdict is a glowing one. Whalefall follows Austin Abrams as he tries to fight his way out of the belly of a sperm whale, and Kojima had plenty to say about it on Twitter/X.

He explained that he'd received a copy of Daniel Kraus's novel — which the film is based on — quite a while back but hadn't gotten around to reading it yet. Kraus was also involved in writing the screenplay. Kojima called the movie "a literary film that explored, in a somewhat metafictional way, the Steinbeck-like relationship between whales and humans as part of an ecosystem, alongside the familial bond between father and son." He also praised the visual effects as outstanding.

But there was one unexpected side effect. "However, I don't think I'll be eating squid for a while," he wrote, complete with a squid emoji. Fair enough — watching someone get swallowed by a whale will do that to you.

If you know Kojima, you know whales are kind of his thing. He said he loves whales and that they appear frequently in his games. Back in the early years of elementary school, he researched whale ecology for a school project, and he's been fascinated ever since — by their enormous size as mammals and their symbolic presence in the marine ecosystem. In MGS2, Raiden is swallowed, digested, and excreted by the enormous Arsenal Gear, which Kojima describes as a whale that swallows digital information. Whales also show up in MGSV and Death Stranding, and there are references to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick too. His only complaint? "It's a shame they didn't make a program for the film."

Getting the whale guts right was apparently quite the process behind the scenes. Director and writer Brian Duffield told IGN for Fall Fan Fest 2026 about the unusual research involved. "We would watch autopsies of beached sperm whales, and there's a bunch of endoscopies of beluga whales and dolphins that we would watch and then talk to the experts and see how much of that we could use and how much would be different with a sperm whale," he said. He added that it was "a real weird time" in his life, with his wife walking in on him closing his laptop lid and asking, "Just another autopsy?"

Whalefall is in theaters now, and our review called it a film that "pulls the viewer into an unthinkably frightening, incredibly gross, and panic-inducing environment that plays on primal human fears about being predator or prey."

So, are you brave enough to sit through Whalefall — and will it change your seafood order? Let us know what you think!