Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ Is Returning To Canadian Theatres 20 Years Later

Dust off your Converse and prepare to return to Versailles. Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is heading back to the big screen in celebration of the cult film’s 20th anniversary.

A newly restored 4K version of the Academy Award-winning 2006 film, starring Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette and Jason Schwartzman as Louis XVI, will arrive in select Canadian theatres this fall. It will be joined by Making Marie Antoinette, a new feature-length documentary offering an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the making of Coppola’s lavish and unconventional historical drama.

Written and directed by Coppola, Marie Antoinette premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24, 2006, where it competed for the Palme d’Or, before arriving in North American theatres that October. Based on Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, the film follows the young Austrian archduchess as she is sent to France, married to the future Louis XVI and thrust into the extravagant—and increasingly precarious—world of Versailles in the years leading up to the French Revolution.

But this was never going to be a conventional period drama.

Coppola famously filtered 18th-century Versailles through a distinctly modern lens, pairing towering powdered wigs, silk gowns and mountains of pastel pastries with a soundtrack featuring New Order, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bow Wow Wow. There was even that now-famous pair of lavender Converse sneakers that briefly appeared among Marie Antoinette’s period-appropriate shoes.

The result was a dreamy, deliberately anachronistic portrait of Marie Antoinette that was as interested in teenage isolation, celebrity and excess as it was historical accuracy. The film also became a fashion and beauty touchstone, thanks in large part to legendary costume designer Milena Canonero, who won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for her work on the film.

Two decades later, those extravagant visuals are getting an upgrade.

The new edition of Marie Antoinette has been restored in 4K by Sony Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with American Zoetrope. The restoration was created from the film’s original 35mm picture negative, with the colour grading approved by Coppola and cinematographer Lance Acord.

But the anniversary is bringing more than just a prettier trip back to Versailles.

Coppola has also turned never-before-seen footage captured during the original production into Making Marie Antoinette, fulfilling a longtime wish of her late mother, artist and filmmaker Eleanor Coppola.

“My mother and I started going through her footage during lockdown,” Coppola said. “It was always her wish to make what she shot into a feature length documentary. She was on set as a filmmaker and also my mother, so I found it so moving to go back through the material and to see our shoot through her eyes.”

The documentary offers a rare look behind the scenes of the 2006 production, including Canonero at work creating the film’s unforgettable costumes and Coppola navigating the massive production as a young female director. It also captures something more personal: a mother documenting her daughter at a pivotal moment in her career.

That makes Making Marie Antoinette more than a traditional behind-the-scenes retrospective. Twenty years later, it serves as both a time capsule of the making of one of Coppola’s most visually influential films and an unexpectedly intimate family portrait.

Marie Antoinette and Making Marie Antoinette will open in select Canadian theatres on October 23, 2026. Both films will then be available to stream globally on MUBI beginning November 6, 2026.