Sword Art Online Movie Confirms North American Premiere

It seems like Sword Art Online has landed on its next big release date! The anime is slated to bring its next movie to life in Japan this fall, and Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria of a Starless Night will shift its focus to Asuna for once. Of course, fans around the world are eager to watch the film, and North American audiences will get the chance before long. Funimation has confirmed when the movie will hit stateside theaters, and it will be a quick turnaround from the film’s Japanese premiere. 

Sword Art Online’s anime recently brought to a close the story of Alicization and War of Underworld, which saw Kirito being placed into a coma with the character Alice attempting to save both him and the digital world they find themselves in. While the first season explored the idea of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game wherein if players die in the virtual world, they die in real life, the subsequent stories have taken Kirito and his friends into new locales and raised the stakes from the initial outing that helped SAO become one of the biggest shows in the genre known as isekai. 

Funimation shared the details that Sword Art Online Progressive: Aria Of A Starless Night will hit theaters in North America and Canada on December 3rd, only a short time following the October release of the anime story that is seeking to dive into the past of Kirito, Asuna, and other characters trapped in the digital domain:

View on X

Following the conclusion of the latest arc in the anime, the franchise has been tight-lipped about a return of the series to the small screen, though the light novels that the series is based on by Reki Kawahara have continued to print new stories that have yet to be adapted. With isekai becoming more of a presence in the medium of anime, with plenty of new series debuting that feature a protagonist who has been snatched from their mundane lives and placed into fantastical environments, there definitely is plenty of space for Sword Art Online to continue within the genre.

Will you be checking out Aria Of A Starless Night when it lands in Western theaters this December? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of Sword Art Online.