Sony’s Sanford Panitch On Theatrical Resilience & Rise Of Japanese IP: “It’s Incredibly Challenging To Have Box Office In Current Marketplace & With Streaming Explosion, Theatrical Bar’s So High Now That IPs Become Super Value. Crunchyroll’s 21M Subscribing Fans Tells You Anime’s Also Not Niche.”
by lowell2017
2 Comments
It’s more challenging when studio heads are so incredibly unaware of how life is outside their bubbles.
The thing is anime at the box office and anime as an industrial force are two different things. Market is indisputably hot and the rise, but that isn’t always going to translate to significant BO (anime’s relatively miniscule budgets make the road to profitability extremely easy to clear at the least.)
Demon Slayer is a huge outlier in this regard. Very few series will scale like it did. Would be cool to see the next film or the third break the $1 billion barrier, but you’re not likely to see some other anime film even come close to IC’s numbers for a long while. I do hope we have another original feature breakout in some way, bonus points if it isn’t a Makoto Shinkai film.
I feel like I bang this drum too much, but I got real sick of the business discourse around Infinity Castle because it brought out ridiculous takes ranging from “Marvel is dead and buried, Disney is finished!” to “Hollywood take notes! All you need is low budgets, high quality, and pre-existing fandoms!”.