A decade on from the animated film that broke Studio Ghibli's grip on the anime box office, the body-swapping romance is heading back to North American cinemas.
GKIDS announced at its Anime Expo 2026 industry panel that a new 4K remaster of Makoto Shinkai's Your Name will open in theaters nationwide beginning August 14. The screenings will run in both original Japanese and an English dub. Ticket sales are expected to be announced later this month.
The film hardly needs introduction, though it rewards one. Your Name premiered in Japan on August 26, 2016, and went on to gross 25.17 billion yen domestically. It remains the highest-grossing original Japanese animated feature of all time, with a worldwide box office exceeding $400 million. It was the first anime made outside Studio Ghibli to earn more than $100 million in ticket sales, and its success rewired industry assumptions about what a non-franchise anime could achieve internationally.
Shinkai directed and wrote the screenplay at CoMix Wave Films. Japanese rock band RADWIMPS composed the score, and the pairing of the group's kinetic pop with Shinkai's hyperdetailed visual surfaces gave the film a texture unlike anything else in wide release that year. Its premise, in which a rural schoolgirl and a Tokyo teenager discover they are inexplicably swapping bodies, operates on a deceptively simple axis.
What drove audiences to return, sometimes multiple times, was how precisely Shinkai rendered longing as a spatial problem.
GKIDS also revealed that a new 4K Ultra HD Steelbook and Blu-ray, distributed by Shout! Studios, will hit shelves on August 25. This marks the first-ever 4K Ultra HD release of the film in North America. The Steelbook is listed at $49.98 and is already available for pre-order. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes segment and an interview with Shinkai.
Collectors and physical-media devotees are already circling the listing. Anime Steelbooks tend to sell out quickly, and this one carries new anniversary artwork revealed at the Anime Expo panel.
The anniversary arrives at a charged moment for Shinkai's career. In January 2026, the director announced via social media that details of his long-awaited next project would be revealed within the year. He has kept specifics close, but hints have surfaced in fragments. Shinkai previously revealed during an event in China that the new story would incorporate inspirations from the country, noting that Chinese locations had given him ideas he intended to fold into the work.
Online leaks have suggested the project may move into full sci-fi territory, while fans have loudly requested adult protagonists after three consecutive films built around teenage leads.
Shinkai carried that momentum through Weathering with You, and then Suzume, building one of the strongest runs any modern anime director has had. His production cycle has been remarkably consistent. He maintained a three-to-four-year gap between Your Name, Weathering with You, and Suzume, which puts a reveal sometime this year on schedule.
Lingering in the background is the long-stalled Hollywood live-action adaptation. J.J. Abrams's Bad Robot and Paramount originally won the rights to develop a remake alongside Toho Co. Director Carlos López Estrada was announced in November 2022, and as of October 2023, producer Genki Kawamura indicated the script was still being shaped, with progress slowed by the pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes. No public update has followed since. The project's silence tends to rekindle debate about Hollywood's track record with anime adaptations every time Your Name trends again.
For now, the clearest path back into the film runs through theaters in mid-August. Whether Shinkai uses the anniversary week to break news about what comes next is speculation, but the timing would be hard to resist.
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