New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Pictures Animation confirmed on May 18 that Hello Kitty, the Sanrio character’s first-ever theatrical feature, has changed directors less than eight months after its release date was announced. David Derrick Jr. and John Aoshima are now set to co-direct the film, replacing Leo Matsuda, who had been attached since March 2021. The movie remains scheduled for a worldwide release on July 21, 2028, the date Warner Bros. confirmed via Instagram on October 29, 2025, with the caption “Hello Hollywood… coming to theaters July 21, 2028.”
Derrick makes the jump from co-directing Moana 2 alongside Jason Hand and Dana Ledoux Miller, his feature directorial debut after nearly a decade as a story artist at Disney and DreamWorks. According to Deadline, Moana 2 crossed $1 billion at the global box office in January 2025, becoming the third Disney release of 2024 to hit that mark and the fourth Walt Disney Animation Studios title ever to do so, joining Frozen, Frozen II and Zootopia.
The film also set the record for the biggest animated opening weekend at the global box office at the time of its release. Before Moana 2, Derrick storyboarded the “How Far I’ll Go” sequence in the original Moana and worked on Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto, Strange World and Jon Favreau’s Lion King remake, following earlier credits at DreamWorks Animation on Bee Movie, How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind.
Aoshima brings a different résumé to the project. He co-directed Ultraman: Rising for Netflix in 2024 alongside writer-director Shannon Tindle, marking his own feature directorial debut. The film went on to win three Children’s & Family Emmy Awards in 2026, including Outstanding Animated Special, and had previously picked up four Annie Award nominations, among them Best Animated Feature, according to Anime News Network. Aoshima’s earlier credits include story work on Gravity Falls and the stop-motion feature Kubo and the Two Strings.
A producer change and a crowded writers’ room
Ramsey Naito, the former head of animation at Paramount and Nickelodeon and a producer on The Boss Baby, has joined the project alongside original producer Beau Flynn of FlynnPictureCo. Shelby Thomas continues overseeing the project for FlynnPictureCo., a role she has held since the film’s directors were previously announced.
Jeff Chan is now writing the current draft of the script, though writing credits have not been finalized. He is the latest in a long line of writers to work on the project: Dana Fox, Katie Dippold, Adam Sztykiel, Jenny Jaffe, Lindsey Beer and Tamara Becher-Wilkinson have all contributed previous drafts, built from an original treatment by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. Fox, whose most recent draft was credited when the release date was announced last October, is also a writer on Wicked. Beer wrote Chaos Walking and Sierra Burgess Is A Loser.
According to New Line, the film is being developed as a globally-scaled story centered on friendship and connection, themes the studio describes as core to Hello Kitty’s appeal since her debut. Specific plot details have not been released.
The deal also opens the door to more than just Hello Kitty herself. Deadline first reported in March 2019 that Sanrio’s licensing agreement with New Line and FlynnPictureCo. covers other characters from the company’s roster, including Gudetama, My Melody and Little Twin Stars, marking the first time those characters had been licensed to a major film studio alongside Hello Kitty. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have both cited that same detail in their more recent coverage, raising the possibility that some of those characters could appear alongside Hello Kitty on screen, though no casting or story details tied to them have been confirmed.
A deal a decade in the making
The film’s roots go back further than its 2028 release date suggests. Sanrio first announced plans for a full-length animated Hello Kitty feature in 2015, targeting a 2019 release. That date came and went; instead, 2019 marked the moment New Line Cinema officially came aboard as co-producer on an English-language film, the first time Sanrio had ever licensed film rights to the character. Producer Beau Flynn spent close to ten years negotiating with Sanrio founder Shintaro Tsuji to secure that deal.
In March 2021, Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. reported that Jennifer Coyle and Leo Matsuda had been hired to direct, with the project confirmed as a hybrid of animation and live-action, a format that has carried through every iteration of the film since, including the version now led by Derrick and Aoshima. Coyle is no longer attached to the project.
Hello Kitty herself dates back to 1974, when Japanese designer Yuko Shimizu created the character, officially named Kitty White, for Sanrio. She now appears on roughly 50,000 different types of merchandise sold annually across more than 130 countries, according to figures cited by Deadline and PRNewswire.
That footprint extends well beyond toy shelves: Variety has reported on dedicated Hello Kitty cafés and a Hello Kitty theme park in Japan, along with collaborations with high-end fashion labels aimed at adult collectors. Sanrio CEO Tomokuni Tsuji described the film as a new chapter for the company when the deal was first announced, tying it to Sanrio’s stated mission of building global connection through its characters.
FlynnPictureCo. is currently finishing post-production on another major family franchise: Disney’s live-action Moana, directed by Thomas Kail and starring Dwayne Johnson alongside Catherine Laga’aia, set for release on July 10, 2026, just over two years ahead of Hello Kitty’s own debut.
The character’s box-office potential draws an inevitable comparison to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which grossed $1.3 billion worldwide in 2023 off a similarly beloved, largely non-verbal video game icon. Hello Kitty presents its own version of that challenge: she has no mouth and has remained silent across her animated series to date, and neither Warner Bros. nor Sanrio has said whether that will change for her theatrical debut.
For now, the project has a confirmed release date that hasn’t moved since October 2025, a producing team that just grew by one, a script still being finalized under its fourth screenwriter in five years, and a directing pair making their second-ever feature together barely two years before the film is due in theaters.
What do you think about the new creative team, are you more excited for Hello Kitty’s big-screen debut now? Let us know below!