Today is the day. Thanks to time zones it’s been June 9th in Japan even longer than it has in North America. Sailor Moon Cosmos Part 1 is now in theatres and lucky fans will have a chance to watch it today! We should expect more information about the films, including spoilers, to roll in throughout the next few days. This of course raises one important question. When is it coming out here?

Unfortunately we don’t have any details about a release of either of the Sailor Moon Cosmos films outside of Japan. This isn’t necessarily surprising. When the Sailor Moon Eternal films were first released in theatres in Japan we also didn’t have any news of an international release. Part 1 had been released on January 8th 2021 with Part 2 following on February 11th. The films weren’t released on Netflix until June 3rd of that same year, nearly five months after the first one had been released in Japan. The announcement wasn’t made until April. If things followed that same timeline, which they certainly won’t match exactly, we could hear about it in about three months, September 2023, and get it on Netflix in about five, around November 2023. This is of course not at all certain. It may not be coming to Netflix. Maybe we’ll get lucky and there will be a short theatrical run! Maybe it will be stuck in limbo for months. We really don’t know, but the past suggests we may not know for a while and this is normal. No reason to panic!

Failing that we can always hold out hope for a Japanese video release. Sailor Moon Eternal Parts 1 and 2 were released on video on June 30th 2021, nearly six months after the theatrical release of the first film. If this sort of schedule is planned for Sailor Moon Cosmos we should see a Japanese Blu-ray release near the end of the year, around December. Nothing is set in stone but an eventual Blu-ray release is pretty much certain at this point. It’s just a question of whether or not we will see it before the movies are released either streaming or in theatres. A Japanese home video release will of course not include any English audio or subtitles. That being said if a domestic release is nowhere in sight by then we should expect fan subs of the films.

A high quality bootleg or fansub of the film prior to some sort of Japanese video or streaming release is unlikely. I of course always encourage fans to support the official releases when they can. Viz has been doing great work in dubbing the original anime, Sailor Moon Crystal and the films and putting them out on quality home video releases and on various streaming platforms. I’m sure they’re working hard to get us Sailor Moon Cosmos as soon as they can manage it and I look forward to seeing these films in whatever method we get.

Have you been lucky enough to see Sailor Moon Cosmos Part 1? If so, what did you think of it?