‘Witch on the Holy Night’: Release Date, Cast, Plot, and Everything We Know

Type-Moon fans have been waiting five years for this one, and it’s finally close. Ufotable’s long-teased film adaptation of Witch on the Holy Night (Mahoutsukai no Yoru) now has a firm date, a locked-in cast, and a fresh trailer to pore over frame by frame. Here’s the release announcement (via X):

— 映画『魔法使いの夜』公式 (@mahoyo_movie) July 7, 2026

Witch on the Holy Night is scheduled to be released on Friday, November 20, 2026. However, no release time has been confirmed as of now, so we’re assuming it’s at 12:00 am JST. Please note that the time is our guess and a placeholder for now; it will be updated once we receive official word. Here’s everything confirmed so far, including the release details and our interpretation of what to expect from the upcoming movie adaptation.

Witch on the Holy Night: Global Release Date and Time

The studio Ufotable has dated its feature film adaptation of Witch on the Holy Night, known in Japanese as Mahoutsukai no Yoru, for Friday, November 20, 2026. The date came out of a dedicated release event held in Tokyo, and it was announced fittingly on Aoko Aozaki’s birthday, July 7th, at a special event in Naka-Ikebukuro Park, Tokyo. So far, this is a Japan-only theatrical release date, and no exact showtimes have gone public yet – that’s typically the kind of detail Japanese distributors drop closer to release, once individual theater chains lock their schedules.

If you’re outside Japan, there’s no global simultaneous release confirmed at this point, so the safest bet is to treat November 20 as the “it exists now” date and wait on regional specifics. Based on the aforementioned time (our guess) and the date of the episode’s official release, here is a listing of every major US and global time zone for the upcoming anime:

TIME ZONE	RELEASE DATE	RELEASE TIME (UNCONFIRMED)
Pacific Time (PT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	7:00 am
Mountain Time (MT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	9:00 am
Central Time (CT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	9:00 am
Eastern Time (ET)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	10:00 am
Alaska Standard Time (AKST)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	6:00 am
Brasilia Time (BRT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	12:00 pm
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	3:00 pm
Central European Time (CET)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	4:00 pm
Gulf Standard Time (GST)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	7:00 pm
Indian Standard Time (IST)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	8:30 pm
Philippine Time (PHT)	Thursday, November 19, 2026	11:00 pm
Japanese Standard Time (JST)	Friday, November 20, 2026	12:00 am
Australian Central Time (ACT)	Friday, November 20, 2026	1:30 am

Where to Watch Witch on the Holy Night?

For now, the only confirmed way to watch is in a Japanese theater (official website). As for international audiences, no official plans have been announced yet regarding screenings in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India, or other global markets. That said, there’s a real reason to expect it’ll travel. Crunchyroll has already been covering the film closely on its own news channel, and Ufotable’s back catalog – the Fate/stay Night trilogy, the Garden of Sinners films – has consistently streamed internationally after their Japanese theatrical runs.

Nothing’s locked in, but industry watchers wouldn’t be shocked to see a Crunchyroll deal follow, whether that’s a limited theatrical run abroad or a straight-to-streaming rollout. If you can’t wait, the source material is already fully accessible in English. The visual novel has an official worldwide translation, available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and PS4, so newcomers can go in already knowing the story beat-for-beat before the movie hits.

The Full Cast and Crew of Witch on the Holy Night

The film is keeping its voice cast the same as the fully voiced game version, which is good news if you’re already attached to these performances:

• Haruka Tomatsu as Aoko Aozaki
• Kana Hanazawa as Alice Kuonji
• Yūsuke Kobayashi as Sōjūrō Shizuki

The story of the original Witch on the Holy Night visual novel is set in the late 1980s and centers on the protagonist, Aoko Aozaki, one of two sister heirs to a long family line of modern mages. Tomatsu voices her disinterested-heiress energy, Hanazawa plays her stoic mentor Alice, and Kobayashi rounds out the trio as the ordinary transfer student who stumbles into all of it.

On the crew side, the project traces back to original creator Kinoko Nasu, who wrote the visual novel and remains attached to the film. Character art comes from longtime Type-Moon collaborator Hirokazu Koyama, and animation production is handled by Ufotable – the studio behind Demon Slayer and the Fate/stay Night films from the Fate series – under the joint Aniplex/Notes/TYPE-MOON production committee. The production committee has not yet revealed the film’s full creative staff lineup, so a specific director credit for the movie itself hasn’t been confirmed publicly – that’s likely something we’ll get closer to release.

Is There a Trailer For Witch on the Holy Night?

Yes, and there have actually been a few now, each one adding a little more. The first real confirmation came back in February, when Ufotable released a video revealing that the theatrical anime adaptation will debut in 2026, following years of anticipation, tucked into a longer promo reel alongside other upcoming projects. It was moody and brief, mostly there to confirm the project was actually moving forward after years of silence.

Then in May, character visuals arrived properly for all three leads, giving fans their first real look at how Aoko, Alice, and Sōjūrō would be designed for the screen. The big one, though, was the July 7th release-date trailer. The trailer leans more on mood rather than plot, featuring a glimpse of the story’s central mansion and Alice Kuonji summoning magic, paired with Ufotable’s signature cinematic visuals, large-scale battle sequences, and atmospheric shots of Misaki Town.

There’s also a quick action beat where Aoko uses her powers to cast an explosive beam of light, giving the first real hint of how the film’s magic will look in motion rather than just in stills. It’s not a full story trailer by any stretch – it’s clearly built to sell tone and atmosphere over plot specifics, which tracks for a studio that likes to let its visuals do the talking early.

What is Witch on the Holy Night About – Everything We Know

The setting is late-1980s Japan, right at the tail end of the Shōwa era, in a quiet, fictional place called Misaki Town. In Misaki Town, an old mansion is rumored to be the home of a witch. After moving there, Aoko Aozaki begins to learn sorcery from a young mage, Alice Kuonji, the rumored witch of the mansion.

Aoko isn’t exactly thrilled about any of this. Although she is disinterested in magic, she is suddenly declared the heir of their family’s magical art, and reluctantly begins her apprenticeship under Alice Kuonji, a young witch who lives in a lonely manor atop a hill. On top of juggling actual sorcery, Aoko balances her duties of learning the arcane while also serving as her school’s student council president.

Then there’s Sojuro, the outsider who wasn’t supposed to be part of any of this. She also makes the acquaintance of Sojuro Shizuki, a new transfer student who is unfamiliar with much of the modern world, and contends with the plots of her older sister Toko Aozaki, who feels that her birthright has been denied. Touko’s resentment isn’t just sibling drama either – it’s eventually revealed that the intruder who had been disrupting the bounded field is Touko Aozaki, Aoko’s older sister, who, having killed their grandfather, now seeks to unveil the Aozaki’s path to the root. So underneath the slice-of-life mentorship stuff, there’s a genuinely dark family conflict simmering.

For longtime Nasuverse fans, the appeal runs deeper than the plot itself. This is the earliest chapter chronologically in Type-Moon‘s shared universe – Aoko later shows up as a mentor figure in Tsukihime, and Touko becomes a central character in The Garden of Sinners. So this movie is essentially the origin point that a lot of other stories eventually built on.

What to Expect from Witch on the Holy Night Movie?

The biggest thing working in this adaptation’s favor is the source material’s structure. Witch on the Holy Night‘s extremely streamlined plot is one feature that works to the movie’s advantage – this one has a straight path, in contrast to large visual novels with multiple paths, and as a result, it should be simpler to condense into a single film without sacrificing too much. Unlike the sprawling, branching Fate franchise, this is a linear kinetic novel, meaning Ufotable isn’t stuck choosing between competing routes – there’s really only one story to tell, which bodes well for pacing.

Expect Ufotable to lean hard into what it already does best: painterly backgrounds, fluid magic effects, and the kind of expensive-looking action choreography that turned Demon Slayer into a global phenomenon. Given the trailer’s early emphasis on atmosphere over exposition, this looks like it’ll play more as a slow-burn mystery with bursts of spectacle, rather than a nonstop action ride.

It’s also worth expecting a fair number of Easter eggs and connective tissue for fans of Tsukihime and Garden of Sinners, given how tightly this story ties into both. Whether the film goes out of its way to explain those connections for newcomers or just lets them exist in the background remains to be seen – but based on how Ufotable has handled Type-Moon material before, expect reverence for the source text over heavy simplification.

TITLE	Witch on the Holy Night
CREATOR	Type-Moon
PRODUCTION COMPANY	Ufotable
RELEASE DATE	November 20, 2026
WHERE TO WATCH	Japanese Theatres as of now

Are you excited for Witch on the Holy Night? Have you played the game yet? We’d love to know your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.