Kaguya-sama: Love is War Film Releases in US Theaters on February 14

Crunchyroll announced on Friday that the highly anticipated Kaguya-sama: Love is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- film will release in theaters across the United States and Canada on February 14, 2023. The movie will release in Japanese with English subtitles with tickets currently available for purchase. Fans can check out the newly released trailer by Crunchyroll with English subtitles below. Kaguya-sama: Love is War -The First Kiss That Never Ends- is animated by studio A-1 Pictures and covers the arc from the manga of the same name, which takes place right where Season 3 of the anime series left off at.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War Anime

The anime first began airing back in 2019 and is a direct adaptation of the manga created by Aka Akasaka. The first season ran for a total of 12 episodes, which later received a second season that aired in 2020. And now, 2 years later, Kaguya-sama: Love is War – Ultra Romantic (Season 3) has taken the anime to a whole new level. The series is now the highest-rated anime of the year on MyAnimeList with a 9.12/10 rating, also marking the series as the #2 highest-rated anime of all time on the site. And it’s not much different on Anilist. The series is currently tied for the #2 spot alongside Gintama° on the all-time rating list, both of which hold a 90% rating. Kaguya-sama Season 3 is also the highest-rated anime of 2022 as well (Spy x Family is second with an 87% rating).

And it’s not just the series that are raking in the high reviews, even the openings are. The opening for Season 2 (below) has garnered over 28 million views on YouTube alone while the latest opening for Season 3 currently has over 5 million. The opening for Season 3 even made it onto the Top 10 Openings of Spring 2022 list earlier this year. The anime went on to win multiple Crunchyroll Awards including Best Comedy, Best Couple, and Best Ending Sequence in 2020. Then again in 2021, Season 2 of the anime won the award for Best Comedy.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War Manga

What started serialization back in 2015 in the seinen magazine Miracle Jump, then later moved to Weekly Young Jump a year later, Kaguya-sama: Love is War has developed into one of the most popular romcom manga of all time. And the craziest part is that the series wasn’t originally a rom-com. According to Akasaka, the story was originally meant to be a fantasy-genre, death game kind of series.

But his editor convinced him to write a more mainstream rom-com since Young Jump didn’t have one at the time. Now, the manga currently has 26 volumes published with the next one set to release in mid-October. US-based publisher VIZ Media picked up the English license for the series in 2017 and has since released the first 23 volumes, with #24 slated to release in December.

And ever since it began serialization, the awards poured in as well. In 2017, the series took home the award in the comics division for manga published in print book format at the Next Manga Awards. Three years later, the manga won in the general category at the 65th Shogakukan Manga Awards. So what turned out to be Akasaka’s first rom-com story ever has evolved into one of the most successful of its genre in manga history.

The Kaguya-sama: Love is War manga currently has over 18 million copies in circulation as of May 2022.