The anime movie based on Kōta Sannomiya’s Blue Lock: Episode Nagi, a spinoff of Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura’s Blue Lock soccer manga, was a hit.
In just three days, it sold 337,000 tickets and made 463 million yen (around US$2.99 million). It grabbed the second spot in the Japanese box office rankings.
The Blue Lock: Episode Nagi movie premiered in Japan last Friday. After the main film, there will be four short anime episodes called BLUELOCK Additional Time! Shown during the first four weeks of screening.
Each week, a new mini-episode will be featured. The movie is also being shown in IMAX, MX4D, and 4DX formats.
For fans in North America, Crunchyroll will bring the film to theaters on June 28, with options for both English subtitles and an English dub.
The movie brings back familiar faces from the cast and crew. Shunsuke Ishikawa, who served as assistant director for the TV anime, took the director’s chair at 8-Bit for the film.
Taku Kishimoto, known for works like Haikyu!!, Silver Spoon, and the 2019 version of Fruits Basket, oversaw the series scripts, with supervision from the manga’s Kaneshiro.
Nomura, the original manga artist, worked as the character designer. Jun Murayama handled the music composition.
Nissy and SKY-HI teamed up to sing the theme song Stormy. Takahiro Nishijima, known as Nissy, is from the group AAA and also does solo music. Mitsuhiro Hidaka, who goes by SKY-HI for his solo career, is also part of the same band.
The spinoff manga zooms in on Seishiro Nagi’s story before he joins the Blue Lock facility. Kodansha USA Publishing shared in October that they’re gearing up to release the spinoff manga in print starting in fall 2024.
Kodansha USA Publishing is making the original Blue Lock manga available in English both digitally and in print. The manga, created by Kaneshiro and Nomura, debuted in Weekly Shōnen Magazine back in August 2018.
Meanwhile, the BLUELOCK TV anime made its debut in Japan in October 2022. Crunchyroll aired the series as it was broadcasted in Japan, offering both subtitles and an English dub. Exciting news for fans: a second season of the anime is on the way.
