Short answers, pulled from the story.
Naruto was written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto. It was serialized in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump from the 21st of September 1999, to the 10th of November 2014, running for 700 chapters collected in 72 volumes.
The Naruto manga has 250 million copies in circulation worldwide, making it one of the best-selling manga series in history. More than half of that total is in Japan, with the rest spread across 46 other countries and regions.
Kishimoto built Naruto from a 1997 one-shot about a boy who could transform into a fox, revising the concept into a ninja story after dissatisfaction with the art and narrative. The tailed beasts mythology was partly inspired by Godzilla, and the hand signs used for jutsu derive from the Chinese zodiac tradition.
Naruto won the Quill Award for graphic novel in 2006 and the 16th Spanish Manga Barcelona award for the shonen category in 2010. Kishimoto won Rookie of the Year in the Japanese government's 2014 Agency for Cultural Affairs Fine Arts Recommendation Awards for his work on the series.
By 2025, Bandai Namco announced that Naruto video games had sold over 37.86 million units worldwide. The first game in the series, Naruto: Konoha Ninpocho, was released in Japan on the 27th of March 2003, for the WonderSwan Color.
Destin Daniel Cretton was hired to direct and co-write the Naruto live-action film, following the departure of Michael Gracey on the 23rd of February 2024. Kishimoto stated that when he heard Cretton would direct, he believed Cretton was the perfect choice.