Can Demon Slayer Reach Pikachu’s Heights in America?
"Infinity Castle" is on track to be the #1 anime in US history. What does that mean for the industry?
Theatrical is one of the hottest topics in the North American anime business this year, despite only representing a fraction of the industry’s revenue. Still, there’s hardly a better barometer for the medium’s success, and a big win for Demon Slayer has wide-spanning implications, making it easier for all anime IP to sell other rights in the US. But first… - Miles Atherton
Chart of the Week
The summer simulcast season (which runs from July through the end of September) is proving to be more than just the summer of sequels.
New titles like Gachiakuta, The Water Magician, Lord of Mysteries, Clevatess, The Summer Hikaru Died, and Tougen Anki have all captured large audiences within the simultaneously niche and broad audience of seasonal anime viewers.
Gachiakuta received the largest promotional push from Crunchyroll this season, and it appears to be working.
The Water Magician has also been getting some Crunchyroll promotion, in the form of social media posts, giving it more attention than most isekai or isekai-adjacent fantasy titles typically receive.
Lord of Mysteries and Clevatess have captured simulcast viewers who are more likely to read manga, read webcomics of any kind, and use online databases (like MyAnimeList) to track their anime viewing.
Tougen Anki has the lowest rate of piracy out of any title in July’s top 10, giving me hope that wider availability is a viable method to combat piracy, which ultimately benefits creators.
The Summer Hikaru Died is a critical darling of the season that has reached viewers beyond typical genre-fiction watchers, quite the feat for a horror and boy’s love story.
Still, it comes as no surprise that Dandadan season 2 came out on top in July. A second season airing within one year of the initial season’s release generally helps maintain a new franchise’s momentum. According to our data, Dandadan season 2 has received a 67% increase in viewership in its first month (July), compared to the first month of season 1. Dandadan is more than just the best of season—it’s a verifiable mega-hit. - Chloe Catoya
Entertainment at Large
Keiichiro Saito and Takashi Nakame: Taking Japanese Anime to the World - The Global Anime Challenge (MANTANWEB)
Keiichirō Saitō, director of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’s first season, sparked a lot of discussion recently from his interview with Mantan Web about the Japanese government-supported Global Anime Challenge. He suggested that overseas audiences often favor specific aspects of anime, gravitating towards what is currently trending rather than engaging with the medium as a whole. This, he noted, is creating a divide between international fans and creators, as their perspectives on anime are starting to differ fundamentally.
His comments referenced Solo Leveling and other popular titles sweeping the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. He fears that overseas fans tend to only celebrate works that stand out visually, an audience attitude that can influence how creators approach their craft, and of course, what anime get produced. Rather than freely expressing their creative vision, directors and animators may feel pressured to align with trends towards flashy action in order to meet market expectations, potentially limiting artistic experimentation.
While he’s correct that overseas fans often gravitate towards the most popular titles, from very specific genres, the Crunchyroll Awards are only one part of the story, and as Miles found out in real time on his podcast, they don’t represent viewership in the most nuanced way either.
For international marketers in the anime industry, this highlights the need for balance in understanding overseas audiences. All media, not just anime, are struggling against the algorithms based on engagement that rule cultural conversation. The most popular things become more popular and the more niche become more niche. People watch what they’ve heard of, influencers post about what will get views, and the cycle continues. Being an anime fan overseas is a very different lifestyle than it was before social media, when you were seeking out titles for yourself.
It’s not that overseas fans aren’t interested in more genres, it’s that only certain types of titles are marketed heavily, and certain types lend themselves to online engagement better than others. Until we can change this vicious cycle of engagement, marketers and industry gatekeepers will need to find creative ways to get around it, or else Saito-san’s fears may come to pass. - Leah T. & Klaudia A.
How Weekly Shōnen Jump Became the World’s Most Popular Manga Factory (The New Yorker)
Matt Alt is back with an incredible feature at the New Yorker detailing the success of Kagurabachi and the machine behind Shonen Jump. This piece has sparked a lot of conversation in the industry, especially in western comics trying to keep up with manga and K-comics. This is an essential read! - Klaudia Amenábar
Further reading:
TO BE HERO X's Anthology Approach Is a Great Way to “Expand” a Universe (Crunchyroll News)
Influencers Gigguk, Dillon Goo, and OtakuVS On Making Their Own Anime (Anime News Network)
Bringing K-Comics to the Next Generation: Inside Ink Pop's Vision for Young Readers (Anime News Network)
The A.V. Club's guide to summer anime (I wrote this one! - Klaudia A.)
Japan Post, Good Smile Temporarily Suspend Package Delivery to U.S. Due to Import Tariffs (Anime News Network)
The Legal and 'Soft' Censorship Affecting Manga in America (Anime News Network)
VTuber Ironmouse Makes Rolling Stone's Top 25 Most Influential Creators of 2025 (Anime News Network)
How “Let’s Play” Leveled Up from Webtoon into an Authentic Anime Through Cross-Cultural Collaboration (Anime Trending)
Can Demon Slayer Reach Pikachu’s Heights in America?
This week, Crunchyroll’s theatrical release of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle will hit a record 3,300+ screens in North America, six times more than the average anime release of the last decade. It’s going to be big. Even if we’re to use the most conservative estimates, Infinity Castle is on track to be the biggest anime film in US history by box office receipts.
So today, we’ll be digging into that history and how Demon Slayer fits into it. How impressive are these projections? What does this say about the state of anime in America?
Let’s go back in time a quarter of a century, 17 million Pokéfans – including a young me! – trekked to movie theaters across North America to see Ash and Pikachu’s first adventure on the big screen, Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back. It was a hit, becoming #1 in the US box office and generating more than 10x the previous Japanese-produced animation in ticket sales.
In the late ‘90s, “Pokémania” was in full force. It was the first time that anime received widespread recognition as being “from Japan”, a cultural dynamic that had been mostly obscured in previous decades. Pokémon was essentially the first anime to receive a wide release in North America*, and with $85M in US box office receipts, Pokémon earned more than 30 times the previous record. In the 25 years since, no other anime film has come close.
But that’s not so strange, is it? Most anime films do not get a wide release (more than 600 screens), and most of those that do get the privilege are re-runs like GKIDS’ Studio Ghibli Fest. And outside of Studio Ghibli, nearly every anime movie with a wide release was part of a larger franchise. Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume is the biggest non-franchise, non-Ghibli film when it comes to the US box office, but it drew in fewer than a million Americans. So to be a box office smash, you generally need to be attached to a franchise, and what franchise, Japanese or otherwise, is bigger than Pokémon?
The second place effort before now was an earlier Demon Slayer film, 2020’s Mugen Train. The movie instantly became Japan’s highest-grossing film of all time, anime or otherwise, breaking numerous records in neighboring countries as well. Mugen Train had the most ideal timing possible for its US release: it was the first movie with a wide release in the aftermath of the COVID shutdowns in 2021, coming out just as major urban centers like Los Angeles and New York allowed cinemas to open once again. It was early enough in the year to still ride the fervor of the film’s massive success in Asia. And, most importantly, the lockdowns had reinvigorated North America’s love for anime, bringing in tens of millions of new fans into the anime ecosystem.
Demon Slayer was already one of the most beloved anime franchises of the decade with North American fans. While a non-insignificant audience would skip screenings out of health concerns, Mugen Train’s release was otherwise the perfect confluence of events to drive as many butts into seats as possible, generating just shy of $50 million in the box office. Even the generation-defining franchises like Dragon Ball have not been able to compete with that figure.
But compared to Western animation, anime is still developing. Studio Ghibli is likely the most popular, well-known, and beloved anime studio of all time in North America, and yet it was only two years ago that one of their films cracked the domestic top 100 with Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
And while anime has been increasingly successful, even these recent box office numbers don’t represent the profound growth anime has experienced in the last five years, a period during which both Crunchyroll’s subscriber numbers and Netflix’s anime viewership have tripled. Last year, Polygon’s much-discussed study suggested that more Americans watch anime than the NFL. If that’s the case, though, you would think something would break through at the box office.
Anime has long been more popular with Americans than traditional metrics would show, as we’ve discussed on this newsletter before. And while we’ve seen companies like Crunchyroll and TOHO’s GKIDS capitalize on this in cinemas, the English-speaking world at large is still lagging behind other parts of the world when it comes to cinema attendance. Can Demon Slayer be the title that can represent the size of the anime fandom in North America?
The movie has already broken records around the world. It’s now the second-highest grossing film in Japanese box office history, with the potential to pass up its prequel for the top spot, Mugen Train. In Taiwan, a country of just 23 million, Infinity Castle has already sold 2.25 million tickets – a sale for nearly every ten people – and is the country’s best-performing animated film of all time. The film is the third best-performing animated film in Korean box office history, and has the equivalent of 8% of the population buying tickets, excluding repeat viewers. That’s the kind of attendance we see for Star Wars movies in the states.
Compared to Koreans, Americans were ~40% as likely to attend Mugen Train screenings on a per-population basis. However, this relationship looks to be changing. The most recent estimates for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle show a significant increase in attention from North American fans.
According to Anthony D'Alessandro at Deadline, “anime moviegoers are a devoted bunch who buy upfront and attend early. There’s hardly any walk-up business on these movies.” This makes sense, not necessarily because they’re dedicated (though they are), but because historically, anime films have had extremely tight windows for release. Fans have been forced to see things on the “one-day-only” schedule and have often assumed there’s no chance for walk-ups or additional screenings outside of that.
But we’ve seen impressive pushes for more screens and longer stints in theaters from Crunchyroll and TOHO International’s GKIDS in the last year, leading to a longer tail for these releases. This has been particularly true in the case of GKIDS’ release of Dan Da Dan: Evil Eye, which nearly doubled its box office after its opening weekend. This kind of early TV release is normally a one or two day event, but 820 theaters kept it for a second week, giving fans ample opportunity to see their favorite characters on the big screen.
And so when I saw that all of the estimates for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle had become more bullish in recent days, I was not surprised. Just look at some of the more reputable estimates for just the movie’s opening weekend:
