Kuromi’s birthday is Halloween, and Sanrio used the date to hand her a film. The company announced on Saturday that its black-hooded character will star in her first feature, which distributor GAGA will open in Japan next year. The reveal came as an English-subtitled video message from Kuromi herself, posted on her birthday.
The title is Kuromi the Movie, according to the film’s website address. The site does not include a director, a studio, a cast list or an exact date, and nothing there says whether the story is a standalone or tied to the shorts she has already headlined.
What Sanrio did confirm is that international release information will follow once it is settled. The website and the video description both carry that line, which is the standard phrasing for a Japanese theatrical announcement that has not yet sold overseas.
From rival to lead
Kuromi’s history explains why this is happening now. She did not start as a Sanrio character goods line. She debuted inside the television anime Onegai My Melody in April 2005, as the rival and sometime-antagonist to the pink rabbit. She was a supporting character in someone else’s show.
That changed slowly. Kuromi has placed in the top five of the Sanrio Character Ranking poll for six consecutive years, which is the company’s own measure of which characters actually sell. A character who ranks that high for that long is not a supporting act anymore.
Sanrio has been testing her as a lead. Two series of Kuromi’s Pretty Journey anime shorts ran in 2023 and 2024. Then came My Melody & Kuromi, a stop-motion series on Netflix that arrived in July 2025. That one is the closest thing to a proof of concept for a full film, and it earned an International Emmy nomination this year, which we covered at the time.
Why a first film is a bigger bet than another series
A theatrical feature is a different scale of bet. Short anime is cheap and fast and tests a character without committing a committee to a large budget. A film needs financing, a distributor and a production pipeline measured in years. Sanrio’s business is licensing, and licensing runs on visibility. A film puts a character in front of families who do not buy character goods, in a format that gets press coverage, and it creates a merchandising window the company controls. GAGA handles distribution for a lot of anime and Japanese films, so the release will be a normal theatrical run rather than a limited event screening.
The Halloween date is not a coincidence either. Sanrio has spent years building Kuromi as the “cute but trouble” option in a catalog built on softness, and a birthday announcement is the cheapest possible marketing: the audience that already follows her does the sharing.
Overseas release still unannounced
For fans outside Japan, the honest answer is that nothing is scheduled. Sanrio has said only that overseas details will be announced when confirmed, which historically can mean anything from a same-year release to a wait of a year or more. The Netflix relationship is worth watching, since My Melody & Kuromi already went that route, but no one has said the film will.
What is confirmed: Kuromi gets her first film, GAGA distributes in Japan, the title is Kuromi the Movie, and it opens next year. Everything else, including whether My Melody appears, is unanswered.
We will update this page as soon as Sanrio dates it or names a studio.
Source: Anime News Network, citing the film’s official website and Comic Natalie.
Featured image: Kuromi the Movie key visual, via the film’s official website.
