Crunchyroll Acquire Makoto Shinkai’s Next Film for Global Release

Sony’s Crunchyroll has snapped up global distribution rights to anime hitmaker Makoto Shinkai‘s much-anticipated next feature.

The anime streamer will co-distribute the untitled project with Sony Pictures Entertainment across the world excluding Asia — with the exception of India, which is grouped with the Western territories. Crunchyroll said Tuesday that the film’s title, plot details and expected timing are all being kept under wraps for now.

While exceedingly little about the new feature is known, Shinkai is unmistakably one of anime’s biggest blockbuster names. His breakthrough feature Your Name grossed $358 million worldwide in 2016, a landmark in anime’s international expansion. Weathering With You followed in 2019 with $193 million, and 2022’s Suzume took roughly $323 million. All three features rank high among the top-grossing anime films of all time.

The new film will follow the same distribution path as Suzume, which was handled jointly by Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures. The film bowed in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival and went on to earn a Golden Globe nomination for best animated feature after earning more than $10 million in U.S. theaters.

Shinkai, 53, has released a feature roughly every three years — Your Name in 2016, Weathering With You in 2019, Suzume in 2022 — and anticipation has been building among anime fandom over the past four years about what his next work might be. The director broke his silence in a New Year’s social media message in January, writing that he would finally be able to share concrete details about his next film sometime this year.

For Crunchyroll, the deal extends a theatrical run that has made the Sony-owned company the dominant Western distributor of Japanese animation — it claims 12 of the 20 top-grossing anime releases in U.S. history, including Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, last year’s global phenomenon.