Jeremy Zag’s feature takes the Parisian superheroes of a hit French cartoon back to their first day in the masks, and spends the second-largest budget in French film history doing it as a musical.

Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie arrived on Netflix on 28 July 2023 in most of the territories where it did not open in cinemas, three weeks after its theatrical release in France on 5 July. It is a feature-length retelling of how two Parisian teenagers, Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste, become the masked heroes Ladybug and Cat Noir, the pair at the centre of a French animated series that its producer says has been shown in more than 150 countries. Jeremy Zag directed it, co-wrote it and composed its music, and the film carried a budget of €80 million (about $86 million), which made it the second most expensive French film ever produced, behind Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

A musical origin story

Marinette is a clumsy, socially awkward girl who goes to school hoping nobody will notice her. She strikes up a friendship with a classmate, Alya Césaire, spends a good part of her day trying to stay out of the way of Chloé Bourgeois, a rich and spoiled classmate, and, while running from her, collides with Adrien, the son of the fashion designer Gabriel Agreste. Adrien has withdrawn from everyone around him since the recent death of his mother, Émilie.

Gabriel has not coped with the loss either. Using the Butterfly Miraculous, a magical jewel, he becomes the villain Hawk Moth (Papillon in the French original) and starts sowing chaos in Paris to draw out whoever will hold the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculous, because together those two jewels are said to hold a “power stronger than death”, and he wants his wife back. His move is sensed by Wang Fu, the guardian of the Miracle Box, who releases the two jewels. After Marinette pulls Fu out of the path of a bus, the Ladybug earrings land in her bag, and the Black Cat ring finds its way to Adrien, each with a tiny companion spirit: Tikki, the Kwami of Creation, and Plagg, the Kwami of Destruction.

Neither teenager is ready. Their first fight, against the Gargoyle, a villain Hawk Moth creates out of the heartbreak of a man whose marriage proposal has just been turned down, is won clumsily and almost by accident, and Marinette tries to give the role back. More villains follow, and the two heroes slowly gain confidence, until each tries to declare their feelings to the wrong person: Marinette to Adrien, Cat Noir to Ladybug. Neither knows who is behind the other mask, both confessions go badly, and the partnership breaks down just as Gabriel decides to turn his power on himself. The final act ties the villain’s plan back to the Agreste family story, and a closing scene at the Agreste mansion leaves a thread open for a sequel.

Where it sits next to the series

The source is Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, the computer-animated series created by Thomas Astruc and developed by Jeremy Zag. It was first shown in South Korea on EBS1 on 1 September 2015 and premiered in France on 19 October 2015 on TF1’s children’s block, TFOU. It has since run to seven seasons and 159 episodes, and outside France it has mostly aired on Disney-owned channels and on Disney+.

The film is not an extension of the series’ continuity. In December 2018, Zag described its plot as a mix of an origin story and the storyline of the series, and the finished film starts from zero: the first transformation, the first villain, the first misunderstanding between the two leads. Most of the French voice cast returns. That choice is the project’s main bet, because it serves a viewer who has never seen an episode while asking long-standing fans, who already know these characters in another version, to start again.

The characters themselves go back to the mid-2000s. Thomas Astruc has said he came up with Ladybug while working as an animator on the series W.I.T.C.H., after meeting a woman who wore a T-shirt with a ladybug on it; Marinette’s pigtails were modelled on her. He first sketched the heroine on sticky notes and imagined her as a comic book until he met Zag, who wanted to produce it as a cartoon. Because the ladybug stands for good luck, Astruc paired her with a black cat that brings bad luck. A traditionally animated, anime-style promotional video was made with Toei Animation in 2012, but the red costume with black spots caused strobing effects in 2D, one of the reasons the series moved to computer animation.

A long road to the screen

Zag announced the film at ComiKon İstanbul on 29 September 2018, with a release then planned for 2021. That December, at Comic Con Experience in São Paulo, he said it would be a musical with songs he would compose himself. At the Cannes Film Festival in May 2019 the project was presented as Ladybug & Cat Noir Awakening, the Chinese studio Fantawild joined in February 2020, and the editing was completed in March 2022. The French release, first set for 3 August 2022, was eventually pushed back to 5 July 2023, almost five years after the announcement.

Zag wrote the screenplay with Bettina Lopez Mendoza from his own story and produced it with Aton Soumache and Daisy Shang. The credited companies are Method Animation, The Awakening Production, SND, Cross Creek Pictures, Fantawild and Zagtoon, the studio Zag founded in Paris in 2009, which later became ZAG Entertainment. The animation was made by Mediawan’s ON Animation Studios in Montreal, with additional animation, lighting and compositing from Dwarf Animation Studio in France; Yvann Thibaudeau edited the film, which runs 102 minutes.

The movement work was handled by a choreography and visualization team, Shannon Holtzapffel and Cameron Sonerson. According to Animation Magazine, they shot live-action video reference for the musical numbers and the action sequences before turning it into computer-animated blocking for the animators, and Ladybug’s movement was based on ballet and jazz.

The songs and the voices

The musical side was built around Zag’s own compositions. Michael Gracey, the Australian director of The Greatest Showman, joined as executive producer to help develop it, and the British songwriter Chris Read co-wrote the lyrics. In the French version the singing voices are not the speaking ones: the singer Lou sings for Marinette and Elliott, a former contestant on The Voice France, sings for Adrien, replacing Anouck Hautbois and Benjamin Bollen, who do their own singing in the series. The duet “Plus forts ensemble” (“Stronger Together”) came out as the lead single on 9 June 2023, the soundtrack album followed on 30 June through Muzeek One and TF1 Musique, and Lou and Elliott promoted it with a showcase in the Salon Gustave Eiffel, on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, on 28 June. One older song also turns up: Wham!’s “Careless Whisper” plays twice.

The French voice cast is the series’ own. Anouck Hautbois voices Marinette and Benjamin Bollen voices Adrien, with Antoine Tomé as Gabriel Agreste, Fanny Bloc as Alya, Marie Chevalot as Chloé and as Gabriel’s assistant Nathalie Sancoeur, Marie Nonnenmacher as Tikki and Thierry Kazazian as Plagg. For English-speaking markets the film was released with an English dub that also keeps the series’ English voices: Cristina Vee as Marinette, Bryce Papenbrook as Adrien and Keith Silverstein as Gabriel. Lou kept Marinette’s singing voice in English, Drew Ryan Scott sang for Cat Noir, and the English version of “Si je croyais en moi”, titled “If I Believed in Me”, was released on 28 July 2023 to coincide with the Netflix launch.

A split release with a split result

The world premiere took place at the Grand Rex in Paris on 11 June 2023, with simultaneous screenings in selected French cinemas that sold 68,582 tickets that day. SND released the film in France on 5 July, the same day it opened in the Netherlands and in the French-speaking parts of Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg; Germany followed from 6 July, and Netflix took it in many other territories from 28 July. A limited American run at three Stone Theatres locations lasted from 11 to 17 August 2023. The marketing included product placement for Volkswagen’s ID. electric cars, a watch collection from the Swatch Group’s children’s brand Flik Flak and a line of Playmates Toys dolls.

The French figures tell two stories. On its first day the film sold 318,144 tickets, the biggest opening day ever for a French animated film and higher than the French opening day of The Super Mario Bros. Movie three months earlier. It topped the weekly chart with 660,421 tickets, then fell 55.5% to 294,174 in its second week, and French analysts ended up describing it as a domestic disappointment. Worldwide it grossed about $40.1 million, $12.4 million of it in France, with Germany and Russia as its second and third markets. What Netflix paid for the rights in the territories where it streamed has not been disclosed, so whether the film lost money overall cannot be stated. Its French reception was also mixed, with praise concentrated on the animation and the songs and reservations about the screenplay and the humour.

What comes next

A sequel has been in the works since the release. In July 2023 Zag said a script for a second film was finished and that work on a third had started, although no studio had greenlit either, and through 2024 he shared concept art, including a new Miraculous holder. In October 2025 the trade press reported that Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie 2 had a creative team: John Cohen, a producer on Despicable Me and The Angry Birds Movie, as producer, and Matt Roller, a writer on Rick and Morty and Community, on the script, with Zag producing through Miraculous Corp., the joint venture between ZAG and the French group Mediawan. No release date had been announced as of November 2026.

That context makes the first film easier to place. It is a brand’s bid to become a cinema franchise as well as a television one, built with a large budget, a pop soundtrack and an origin story aimed at a family audience that may never have seen the series. The ticket numbers suggest the fan base turned up on opening day in France and thinned out quickly after that, and the decision to restart the story rather than continue it is the point on which viewers are most likely to split. Long-time fans know the version of these characters they prefer; newcomers get a self-contained introduction, with songs.