Update, April 27, 2024: Well, it looks like there’s been some progress. While we still don’t have a date for when the movie will hit Max, GKIDS has announced The Boy and the Heron will be available for own on demand via digital platforms beginning June 25. (You can already preorder it on Apple here.) On top of that, the Oscar-winning movie will get a physical DVD release on July 9. Let the summer of Miyazaki begin!
Original story, March 12, 2024: Prepare for parakeet poo, because this year’s newly crowned Best Animated Feature is heading to streaming. The Boy and the Heron, the box-office-smashing anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, will follow its Studio Ghibli forebears to stream on Max in the United States. The Japanese film may be a latecomer to the major awards-season films available to stream, but is a welcome addition; the acclaimed director’s film is partly autobiographical, informed by his and his family’s experiences witnessing the horrors of World War II.
We still don’t have an exact date for when The Boy and the Heron will hit the service, but the move to Max — which was announced March 12, two days after it won the Oscar — is somewhat expected. All the other Studio Ghibli films, which are distributed in the U.S. by indie shop GKIDS, have called it their streaming home since the app’s launch as HBO Max in 2020. In the the years since they’ve remained on the service despite parent company Warner Bros. Discovery’s merger, the relaunch into Max, and the ensuing content purges the company brought to its flagship streamer. News of The Boy and the Heron’s streaming status came as part of a multiyear extension of WBD and GKIDS’s licensing agreement, so all of the Ghibli films should remain on the service for the foreseeable future.
Outside the U.S. and Japan, Netflix will be your go-to streamer for the film, as it has been for other Ghibli titles. The service announced March 21 that GKIDS, Ghibli, and the distributor Goodfellas extended Netflix’s global distribution deal in the wake of The Boy and the Heron’s success. (Internationally, Netflix has carried the Ghibli titles since 2020.) Like Max, Netflix also declined to give an exact streaming date for now. It may feel like a long time to wait given that The Boy and the Heron hit U.S. theaters widely in December, but the schedule is likely delayed by the fact that the film has yet to debut theatrically in major markets like India and China, let alone on physical media or VOD anywhere — release windows that typically run ahead of streaming. You’ll have to wait a bit longer to savor Robert Pattinson’s gravelly tones as the titular heron on streaming.
This story has been updated.
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