Weathering With You has made the rounds across Japan all throughout 2019, establishing itself as a jaw-dropping and well-directed followup to Makoto Shinkai’s cultural phenomenon Your Name. In 2020, though, the film will finally be making its presence known overseas as GKIDS begins rolling out a proper wide release and full theatrical debut of the animated movie. To lead up to the upcoming theatrical release of the film, GKIDS has released a new trailer for Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You that reveals the cast of actors involved in the English dub of the film.
The English dub cast for the film is as follows:
- Brandon Engman as Hodaka
- Ashley Boettcher as Hina
- Lee Pace as Suga
- Alison Brie as Natsumi
- Emeka Guindo as Nagi
- Riz Ahmed as Takai
- Vinnie Penna as Kimura
- Mike Pollock as Yasui
- Barbara Goodson as Tachibana
Surprisingly, the English dub cast of the film is made up of a wealth of on-screen talent rather than regular anime voice actors. The supporting cast is most notably made up of some big Hollywood names. Lee Pace is an American actor who’s most recognizable as Thranduil the Elvenking in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, as well as Ronan the Accusor in Guardians of the Galaxy and Ned in Pushing Daisies. Alison Brie, meanwhile, is an accomplished television actress in North America, most notably starring as Annie in Community, Ruth Wilder in GLOW, and Diane Nguyen in BoJack Horseman. Finally, Riz Ahmed is a rising star in Hollywood, having recently played the villain Carlton Drake in the Venom film as well as starring in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story as Bodhi Rook.
Fans in America won’t have to wait long to hear the star-studded cast of Weathering With You in action. Fathom Events plans to screen the film in select theaters across the United States on January 15th and 16th. These two-day screenings will be part of a “Special Fan Preview” event for the film, with the screenings containing exclusive bonus content for theater-goers. After this two-day preview event, GKIDS will officially open the film in North America for a widescale theatrical release on January 17th. For fans of the original Japanese audio, these wide release screenings starting on January 17th will have both English-subtitled screenings as well as English-dubbed screenings.
Additionally, The Palm Springs International Film Festival has also been running special preview screenings of Weathering With You this month. The film screened in California on January 3rd at the “Mary Pickford is D’Place,” and it screened again this Monday, January 6th, at the Regal Cinemas in Palm Springs. A final preview screening in California is planned for January 10th at 12:45 PM at the Mary Pickford is D’Place.
Of course, while these are debut screenings for the film in North America, Weathering With You opened in Japan back on July 19th of 2019. It debuted across 359 theaters and 448 screens, selling 1,159,020 tickets for a total profit of 1,543,809,400 yen in its first three days. That comes out to around $15.22 million. It ended up ranking #1 during its opening weekend, and by December 8th had earned a total of 14.02 billion yen ($129 million). As of now, the film is the #7 highest-earning domestic film of all time in Japan, and was also the highest-grossing film in Japan in 2019.
Weathering With You went on to win the Audience Award at the Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles this past October, and also ended up winning the Best Animated Feature Film award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Australia on November 21st. On top of that, the film received a nomination in the Best Animated Independent Feature category for the 47th Annual Annie Awards, which will be held on January 25th, 2020. While the movie was for consideration to be featured in the Animated Feature Film category and the Best International Feature Film category for the 92nd Academy Awards, it did not make the shortlist for either category.
