Yuri!!! on ICE returns to cinemas for its 10th anniversary
Crunchyroll Anime Nights puts the first five episodes of the 2016 figure-skating anime back on the big screen in the United States and Canada on 19 October, for one night only.
Yuri!!! on ICE is going back to the big screen ten years after it first aired. Crunchyroll Anime Nights is putting the anime's first five episodes into cinemas across the United States and Canada on 19 October, one night only, at 7pm local time, in Japanese with English subtitles.
Tickets are selling through Fandango, which is already listing participating venues. There is no new episode, no remaster and no word on the franchise's future attached to the booking: just five episodes and an audience that has spent a decade waiting for the next thing.
A decade of figure skating, and a cancelled film
The series premiered on 6 October 2016 and ran for 12 episodes on TV Asahi, directed by Sayo Yamamoto from original scripts by Mitsurou Kubo and animated at MAPPA. It follows Yuri Katsuki, a Japanese figure skater who collapses at the Grand Prix Final, goes home to Hasetsu to sulk, and ends up coached by his idol, the Russian champion Victor Nikiforov, while a teenage rival who shares his first name fights for the same attention.
The show became one of the biggest anime of the decade and one of the few to cross into mainstream sports coverage, helped by routines choreographed with the former competitive skater Kenji Miyamoto. Its follow-up did not survive: Ice Adolescence, a feature film originally planned for 2019, was cancelled outright in April 2024 after years without a firm release date. A side story manga, Yuri on Ice Side Story: Welcome to The Madness, shipped with the final Blu-ray volume in 2017, and the franchise has lived on merchandise, concerts and fan events since.
The cinema run sits under Crunchyroll's Anime Nights banner, the streamer's recurring theatrical programme. The screenings are subtitled only, with no dubbed dates listed, and the five-episode block covers the collapse at the Grand Prix Final, Yuri's viral copy of Victor's routine, their first meeting at the onsen and his competitive return against Yuri Plisetsky. The series remains on Crunchyroll, so the ticket buys a room rather than access.
Our opinion
Ten years is a long time to wait for a second act, and this anniversary reads as a reunion rather than a revival. Screening the opening five episodes is the cheapest possible way to put the franchise back in front of its audience: no new animation, no production risk, and a trailer that sells a decade of goodwill in under 90 seconds. It is a sharp piece of marketing, and it is also an admission that nobody has worked out what Yuri and Victor do next.
The more telling decision is the map. A single subtitled night in US and Canadian cinemas is a low-cost event with a guaranteed audience, but no UK, Irish or wider European screenings have been announced alongside it, which turns a global anniversary into a regional one. The fans who made the show a phenomenon outside Japan are being asked to celebrate it on the sofa while North America gets the ice. Anniversary events only work when the audience can actually turn up, and half of this one cannot.