How Streaming Helped Demon Slayer Slay the Box Office
It’s been a lackluster summer at the box office, but last weekend proved a massive one for anime in theaters: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle topped the charts with a $70 million opening, shattering several box-office records along the way. The thrice-punctuated title is a win for Crunchyroll, which is responsible for the bulk of its overseas rollout, and a boon for parent company Sony, whose previous animated effort, Kpop Demon Hunters, broke out on streaming but netted the company just $20 million owing to its deal with Netflix.
If the scale of Kpop Demon Hunters’s success was surprising, Demon Slayer’s victory was anything but for those paying attention to the anime business, particularly on streaming. The movie is the first of a trilogy that will serve as the finale of the Demon Slayer anime series. Based on a manga, the action-fantasy show has around since 2019 and spread its rollout across four seasons and a handful of theatrical releases (both original films and episode compilations). Along the way, it’s become one of anime’s most successful streaming properties and serves as an Ur-example for how an anime title in that space can break out theatrically. It’s expected to cross the $100 million mark in U.S. theaters today. Here are three reasons why.
Demon Slayer has always been easy to start watching
Since its release, the show has divided its domestic availability among four major streaming services — Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and Funimation (later acquired by Crunchyroll) — and the highest-profile linear home for anime, Adult Swim’s Toonami block. Jason DeMarco, the senior vice-president of anime, action series, and long-form content for Adult Swim and Warner Bros. Animation who worked on Demon Slayer’s Toonami acquisition, has told Vulture before that “with anime, exposure is oftentimes more important,” especially if it’s a shōnen title, one aimed at young boys. The accessibility builds and supports hype, and it especially lets kids join in on conversations about the show with their friends, whether a given family’s main streaming subscription is Netflix or whether it has the ESPN-Hulu-Disney+ bundle.
Demon Slayer has always been easy to get into watching
The fact that this is a shōnen title is a critical piece of its success. The anime fandom has for decades been dominated by young male audiences, and according to data firm Parrot Analytics, the top-25 most in-demand titles on streaming consistently resonate with the demographic. Demon Slayer may be an artfully made and critically well-received show, but it’s also as much of a blockbuster, action-stuff boy’s adventure as most Star Wars or Marvel fare. Just about anyone can identify with the trauma and trials its protagonist Tanjiro Kamado endures as he fights off demons because these shows fit into the genre molds left by titles like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z.
Today, they’re streaming anime’s bread and butter and regularly dominate the anime engagement rankings published by the analysts at White Box Entertainment and elsewhere. These shows may be targeted at young boys, but their appeal is so massive that they’ve become critical to program on streaming. Years ago, a former Disney animation executive once reductively described anime in general to me as “very action, very boy, very aggressive,” expressing skepticism over the shōnen genre’s potential in American theaters, but Demon Slayer is undeniably all of that and has nonetheless formed such an intense attachment to audiences that it hardly matters.
Demon Slayer spun must-see streaming TV into must-see movies
Releasing Infinity Castle as a theatrical trilogy instead of a season of television was nominally done for narrative reasons, aligning with the manga source material’s climactic moments, but it’s also a canny marketing move. The big screen blowup allows the producers and distributors to release the same story multiple times if they so choose. The first time the franchise did this with a theatrical-first entry was 2020, when it released Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Mugen Train. It grossed $506 million worldwide and, as a COVID release, became the biggest worldwide box-office movie of the year. After Mugen Train’s theatrical success, it enjoyed a second life as the episodes were recut and expanded into the first arc of the TV show’s second season.
Loyal fans needed to watch the theatrical release to keep abreast of the conversations about the show and again to catch anything that may have been tweaked in the recut. One assumes a similar strategy is likely for Infinity Castle. Rather than competition, the president of GKIDS, Dave Jesteadt, who has released several TV titles to theaters as compilation films of shows like Dan Da Dan and Gundam, sees it as “an incredible additive experience for streaming.” The conventionlike theatrical moment lets fans meet up and cosplay and lets producers and licensors cash in once before they can cash in again on licensing the show for a streaming release. Fans won’t mind. They’ll get to talk about it again.
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