Singapore-based licensing company ODEX Pte. Ltd. has announced in a Facebook post on Tuesday that the upcoming Sword Art Online film will be released simultaneously in six countries in Southeast Asia in February 2017.
Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale will be released in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei on Saturday, February 18, 2017, which is the same day when the movie will premiere in Japanese theaters.
In a response to a Facebook post, the licensor says that the movie will be screened in SM Cinema branches, but no further details has been announced.
Anime Pilipinas are trying to reach SM Cinema management for comment.
In 2026, two years since the SAO incident, a new game called “Ordinal Scale,” an Augmented-Reality MMO, is becoming popular among the players. But… strange things are happening in the game and Kirito and the gang are facing a new danger. (Synopsis from Aniplex of America)
Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale is the anime film adaptation of the highly-popular light novel series Sword Art Online, written by Reki Kawahara with illustrations by abec.
The novel was released by ASCII Media Works since April 2009 under their Dengeki Bunko imprint, which currently has 18 volumes. After the release of its highly-popular anime series in 2012, the franchise has expanded to multiple novels, manga and video games.
The upcoming film will be an original story that will take place after the “Mother Rosario” arc (Sword Art Online II), which will be written by Reki Kawahawa and directed by Tomohiko Ito. Character designs will once again be made by Shingo Adachi for anime studio A-1 Pictures.
Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (as Kirito), Haruka Tomatsu (as Asuna), Rina Hidaka (as Silica), Ayahi Takagaki (as Lisbeth), Miyuki Sawashiro (as Sinon), Hiroaki Hirata (as Klein) are set to return to voice their characters in the movie.
The upcoming movie was launched during World Cosplay Summit last August, where the film’s trailer was played simultaneously in Japanese with English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, and Thai subtitles.
Japanese publisher Kadokawa had announced in October that the movie “will be simultaneously released worldwide” on Saturday, February 18, 2017, but the publisher did not indicate how will it be done.
