The Film With No Director Is the One Expanding — The Circuit Built by the Paprika 4K Revival

From 82 screens to 100, with the run already underway

Lined up in order, the movement is visible.

On 8 December 2025, Sony Pictures announced the 20th anniversary: the first nationwide revival run for the 4K remaster, opening 2 January 2026². That release gave no screen count, and the theater list printed with it came to roughly thirty venues³.

Six months later, on 1 June 2026, the expansion was announced. It opens by noting that "the January 2026 revival run drew a strong response," and sets 82 screens nationwide from 7 August. A parenthesis follows immediately: additional theaters to be added in stages⁴.

Filmarks' official account then announced added venues, bringing it to 90. And as of the 31 July update, both FILMAGA and the official Filmarks Revival site say 100 screens nationwide⁵⁶.

Ahead of the expansion sat two preview runs: Shinjuku Piccadilly from 17 to 23 July, and Demachiza in Kyoto from 31 July⁷. Places to read the reaction, positioned before the scale was set.

So this is not a commemorative run whose size was fixed in advance. It is a variable release that measures response and raises output accordingly. January's response set August's 82; August's response set 100. What gets set next has not been set yet.

There is a review service in the distributor credit

The distributor line for the expanded run reads:

Distribution: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Filmarks⁴

Filmarks is a film review service. It is where users assign scores, write impressions, and tap "want to see." That company is credited as a distributor of a twenty-year-old animated feature.

Filmarks Revival runs under the line "carrying great films into the future," and has previously returned Ghost in the Shell 4K, MEMORIES, Patlabor the Movie and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 4K to theaters⁶. The pattern in that list is legible: older films with thick review counts and scores, where the number of people saying they want to watch is already visible.

This is the part I keep coming back to. What justifies putting an old film back on screens is not criticism and not a critical reappraisal, but aggregated interest. Nobody has to argue that the work is historically important for the project to move; the tally of "want to see" comes first.

There is no need to sneer at that. But it is worth being precise about what the metric is. The metric is whether it will sell again, not what deserves to survive.

The theatrical face and the disc face are run separately

The key visual for the expanded run reuses the 2006 tagline unchanged, Your dreams are being violated, and the only thing added is the 20th anniversary logo in the lower right. Advertising copy written twenty years ago is serving as the film's face in 2026.

The package for the Paprika 4K UHD + Blu-ray set, out 9 September, is composed differently.

Image source: Happinet Corporation press release (prtimes.jp)

Paprika and Atsuko Chiba sit side by side at the center, with images from the film framing them. The theatrical face is one face and a crowd; the package face is two faces and a world. The same film has been given different faces for different points of sale.

Neither is Kon's hand. Both are rearrangements of material he drew.

The contents of the set are likewise remade by present-day decisions. Audio is Dolby Atmos and Dolby TrueHD 7.1ch; the price is ¥12,980 including tax; it is issued by Happinet Media Marketing⁸. The 4K UHD disc carries a featurette called "Restoring Paprika," an interview with the engineers who did the 4K restoration. The restoration work is itself being sold as value.

What played in a cinema in 2006 and what will play in a living room in September are not the same sound. That is not degradation, but it is an update. Who performed the update is printed on the back of the box, and it is not Satoshi Kon.

What the circuit cannot reach: The Dreaming Machine

There is another work with the same director's name on it, in an entirely different state.

When Kon died, he was in production on his fifth feature, The Dreaming Machine¹. The farewell text published the day after his death says:

My greatest regret is the film Yume Miru Kikai. The film itself, of course, but I also cannot stop worrying about the staff who joined it.⁹

In the same text he records an exchange with producer Masao Maruyama. When he voiced his worry, the answer came back: don't worry, we'll manage it somehow⁹.

By 2018, though, Maruyama was stating plainly that the project was frozen.

Japanese animation today has excellent directors with different sensibilities, but no director with Kon's ability. For now I cannot picture anyone but Kon, so there was nothing to do but freeze the project and leave it as a plan.¹⁰

In the same interview he added that if a talented director from overseas wanted to take it on, he would not rule it out¹⁰. Even so, it is not moving.

This is where the spine of the piece is.

The circuit that pushed Paprika from 82 screens to 100 does nothing whatsoever for The Dreaming Machine. To measure response you first need something to measure. With no finished object to score, no tally begins. The Dreaming Machine is not badly rated. It is not a candidate for rating at all.

And one more thing. The decision to stop it was not made by any tally. Maruyama, one person, stopped it on the judgment that without Kon it would not be a Kon film. That is a view of authorship, not a number.

Two decisions sit side by side this summer, under the same director's name: expansion by aggregation, and suspension by a person. The first updates in public every week. The second has not moved in eight years.

The anniversary of his death falls inside the run

The run opened on 7 August. A campaign listed on the official Filmarks Revival page closes on 27 August⁶. Dates and run lengths vary by theater, but as a campaign it is at least running across 24 August.

That is the day Kon died. Sixteen years ago.

No release, however, says the schedule was counted backward from that date. The 7 August start was set by January's response. The overlap is most likely coincidence.

It still overlaps for whoever is sitting in the seat. The circuit does not design a memorial, but it does supply the room where one happens. What to do with that coincidence is probably not the distributor's department.

Still, without the circuit there is nothing to watch

I don't want to end on the negative.

There is at present almost no other mechanism that can put a twenty-year-old animated film onto a hundred screens. The preservation work of the National Film Archive of Japan, written about separately, is indispensable, but it operates at a different scale and speed. Designs like Summer Vacation at the Cinema, which tries to hand children the cinema itself, are needed at the same time.

An earlier piece read the remake wave as a re-access route, and argued that as institutional preservation thins, the commercial distribution circuit thickens. This one digs a layer into that circuit. What the thickened circuit uses as its metric is review aggregation. The selection logic deciding which past gets sold now has the same shape it has in music reissues.

The problem is not that the metric is unfair. It is that the metric reaches only so far.

Aggregation can measure only what was finished and distributed. So Kon's "present visibility" drifts toward whichever of his completed films sits most easily in the tally. However large revival culture grows, The Dreaming Machine will not enter it.

The number that moved from 82 to 100 was pushed there by audiences, and I think that is straightforwardly good. But in the same summer, something that cannot be pushed at all has been sitting frozen for eight years. Who takes responsibility for what falls outside the circuit is a question best raised while the circuit is healthy.

Sources

• Satoshi Kon's Paprika 4K remaster expands nationwide from 7 August — Sony Pictures
• Paprika 4K remaster opens nationwide from 2 January 2026 — Sony Pictures
• Expanded nationwide run from 7 August, with anniversary events and merchandise — Tsumiki Inc.
• Paprika 4K UHD + Blu-ray set on sale 9 September — Happinet Corporation
• Admission gift announced for the expanded run — FILMAGA
• Filmarks Revival Screenings: carrying great films into the future
• Satoshi Kon, director of Paprika and Millennium Actress, dies of pancreatic cancer — eiga.com
• Sayonara — KON'S TONE
• Why the late Satoshi Kon's unfinished Dreaming Machine was frozen — Cinema Today
• Can the remake boom substitute for preservation?
• Who are reissues for?