Just a quick update.
Director tweeted about it. And the official site now says more than 150 000 tickets sold when it loads. Or maybe it says that for a while and I only noticed now.

About the new messages at the start of the movie with An and now Kouji, Matsuura Mai tweeted about how she drew something for Kouji’s so they do have illustrations.

18th March is Shinichiro Miki’s bday, and there’s a send him happy bday message thing going on until the 17th 22:00 japanese time.
I like it because in the list at the beginning with his notables roles, there’s his classic roles like Allen or Koujiro, and at the end when it switches to more recent they wrote “Jin in King of Prism”.  Too bad you can only choose one character, else I’d put in Allen, Koujiro, Shannon Casull, Creed, Takumi, Kurtz and Jin.  In the end I ended putting in Allen and wrote about how I actually first watched Escaflowne dubbed in French and only got to hear his performance as Alen some years later, and how I really like it and that whenever I rewatch Alen’s proclamation of duel in the final episode it always gets me excited.