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An animated drama featuring hordes of carnivorous fiends might not sound like classic box office fodder, but that’s exactly what Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle proved to be in September.
The film set new records for anime – Japanese animated films and series – making more than $70m (£52m) on its opening weekend in the US and £535m so far globally. To put that in context, Ghost in the Shell – an anime classic released in 1995 – made about £2m worldwide.
In that 30-year period, anime has gone from an underground phenomena to a saviour during one of the worst autumn box office slumps in recent memory. So how did we get here?
Mitchel Berger, an executive vice-president and the head of theatrical at Crunchyroll – the specialist anime streaming service – was pleasantly surprised by the Demon Slayer mania.
He says one of the keys to its success has been the slow building of a worldwide fanbase for franchises such as Demon Slayer, which also has a TV series and had already secured one box office success with 2020’s Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train (that time, the fiends were trying to eat passengers on a train).
“We have spent the last eight years building this fandom,” says Berger. “Coming out of the pandemic, that fandom has just continued to grow.”
Crunchyroll, which is owned by Sony and co-distributed Demon Slayer with its parent company, passed 17 million subscribers this year, and has 50,000 hours of anime on its service.
Anime first emerged from Japan during the 1950s but its world breakthrough moment came in 1988 with Akira, the dystopian tale of a near-future Tokyo ravaged by biker gangs. Its influence can be clearly seen in everything from cyberpunk to Stranger Things, and ushered in a more grown-up, darker brand of animation.
Demon Slayer sees anime gatecrashing Hollywood and establishing Japanese animation as a potential rich resource in an era when IP is king. Most, but not all, anime begin life as manga, Japanese comics, which may have years of backstory. Others come from video games.
It provides rich pickings for studios who want to spin things out into Marvel-sized franchises. And it is not just the cineplex crowd who are getting in on anime. The director of Nomadland, Chloé Zhao, grew up reading manga in China and has set up Kodansha Studios to turn manga into live-action projects.
Its new globalised reach means anime can materialise in some unlikely places. Olympic athletes, UFC fighters, Premier League footballers and rugby league stars have all referenced anime shows in their celebrations – while some have described the art form as “a lingua franca for young people all over the planet”.
“It’s part of young people’s identity, it’s how they express themselves,” says Patrick Macias, an anime writer who lives in Tokyo. “I think that really is fuelling this rise of anime, not just in the US, but globally.”
Macias also puts the spike in interest around the art form down to “Oshikatsu”, a phenomena which began in Japan but was supercharged by South Korean K-pop where devout fanaticism is the norm. “You’re not just going to the movies,” he says. “You’re buying all the merchandise, you’re taking pictures of all the merchandise you bought, and you’re sharing it with your friends.”
The Japanese government is betting big on anime. It is a key part of its “Cool Japan” plan, a soft-power initiative it is hoping can boost its economy by piggy-backing off the hardcore fandom to drive cultural tourism.
The country’s leaders, who are in charge of a lethargic economy, hope the strategy can bring in ¥50tr (£240bn) annually by 2033 – about 8% of Japan’s GDP. It marks a step change in approach from the country which has been protective of its culture traditionally. “The domestic market was big enough here for a long time,” says Macias. “It was an afterthought to spread this culture globally.”
South Korea has already been through this process and seen the benefits of opening up to a global audience: BTS, the country’s biggest K-pop band, contributed almost £3bn annually to its economy in 2020. “K-op showed what a modern version of opening the borders to let this culture spread a little more freely looks like,” says Macias.
The other platform that looms large in the world of anime is Netflix. Berger will not comment on the possible Warner Bros deal with Netflix, but whatever happens after the battle between the media CEOs, it is likely that Netflix will remain Crunchyroll’s main competitor. The streamer says the number of subscribers watching anime on its platform has tripled in the last five years, and it currently dubs the latest releases into 33 languages to meet global demand.
Demon Slayer’s second and third instalments are also in the works – although they will not be available until 2027 and 2029. Before then, the second season of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of One Piece will be released in March 2026, hot on the heels of the third season of Shinya Umemura’s Record of Ragnarok, which sees humans – including Nikola Tesla – fight gods in a battle for the “survival of humanity”.
The stories are epic but so are the economic upsides of anime’s seemingly unstoppable rise.
