Anime movies, whether adaptations, original stories, or compilations, have always found a dedicated home in Japanese multiplexes. Furthermore, whenever a new anime season is set to begin, some cinemas in major cities have long since played host to limited preview screenings of hotly-anticipated TV anime, with voice actors and key staff joining a packed house of fans for an early screening of the first few episodes of a highly-anticipated new anime.
As a new season kicks off, the cycle is repeating itself once again: The Apothecary Diaries Season 2 was one of many anime to repeat this long-storied tradition by showcasing the first two episodes to select fans in cinemas. Yet the intertwined connection of TV anime and the broader anime industry with the theatrical ecosystem in Japan is creating a noticeable shift in this long-loved hype mechanism.
Anime is bigger than ever in Japanese cinemas, fueled only further by the post-COVID excitement for anime and the growing retreat of international releases from the Japanese box office. In 2024, the top two highest-grossing films were the yearly Detective Conan film grossing a mind-boggling 15.7billion yen, and the latest Haikyuu!! film earning 11.5billion yen, making them the 14th and 34th highest-grossing films of all time in Japan. Anime have topped the box office every year with the exception of 2023 when the Super Mario Bros. Movie earned 0.2billion yen more than the Conan movie for that year.
Notably, each of these major success stories were not original anime, but series that enjoyed phenomenal success on the small screen only to either tell an original story using these already-beloved characters (Detective Conan, One Piece films), or, in a major departure from years past, continue adapting major storylines on the biggest screen possible. Demon Slayer became the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time by bringing its Mugen Train arc to cinemas in the depths of COVID, with Jujutsu Kaisen 0 also becoming a major hit by making this approach.
Audience attendance at Japanese cinemas remains strong, with many of these people specifically seeking out new anime. Thanks to streaming accessibility and theatrical abundance, anime is bigger than ever, at home and abroad. Anime production committees are adapting to this, piggybacking on anime’s theatrical success to help build excitement, awareness, and a bit of cash towards their upcoming anime
With more anime than ever releasing every season, it’s harder than ever for an anime to gain the airtime needed to build a fanbase and audience that will return to the show from week to week. As opposed to limiting early premieres of new episodes to a select few fans able to attend a special screening, some production committees have opened up this experience to everyone by giving these episodes a broad, film-like nationwide theatrical release.
Last year, we saw Demon Slayer once again preview its upcoming season by screening select episodes in cinemas for the To the Hashira Training arc, marketing it as a world tour that simultaneously screens in other countries around the world. This follows up their 2023 World Tour screenings for the Swordsmith Village arc, and shows just how successful these screenings can be. In Japan alone, the To the Hashira Training screenings earned over 2 billion yen and entered the top 20 for theatrical releases in 2024, but it doesn’t take a series as big as Demon Slayer to make this nationwide rollout of preview episodes a success.
Oshi no Ko is one of the biggest examples of a series finding major success with this formula, bringing the extended 90-minute opening episode to theaters nationwide for three weeks prior to its initial TV broadcast in order to build anticipation for the series. Developing an extended opening episode for a series as dense as Oshi no Ko in the original manga’s opening chapters makes sense for an anime adaptation to hook audiences without losing interest in its many early-game twists and turns. The decision allowed for the full premise of the series, from the sudden death and rebirth of our protagonists Ruby and Aqua through to the reveal of its true mystery following the sudden death of their idol-turned-parent Ai Hoshino.
This season, numerous anime are making the jump to theaters nationwide ahead of their general broadcast. The latest Bang Dream! anime, Ave Mujica, brought its opening episodes to select theaters nationwide over the new year period, while the upcoming khara series Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is releasing a theatrical edit of its opening episodes in mid-January ahead of a premiere later this year.
Even away from new releases, TV anime are encroaching ever-further into the halls of cinemas nationwide: January also marks 50 years of Space Battleship Yamato, being marked by numerous curated programs of select episodes from the series making their way into cinemas for a limited time.
While the practice may be more common, and the success of theatrical canon follow-ups to already successful anime and anime in theaters more broadly is evident, does this sort of nationwide rollout allowing fans to sample anime early for the cost of a movie ticket actually result in greater success for the anime that adopt this practice? It’s hard to say for certain.
While Oshi no Ko was a hugely successful series that took advantage of an early release in this manner, the impact it had on the series’ eventual success is harder to determine. The actual box office returns on this limited release were a far more modest affair, earning roughly 100million yen over its limited 3-week engagement despite already having 5 million copies of the manga in circulation prior to its release and having a strong fanbase going into the series. These are hardly groundbreaking numbers, and while the anime did go on to be a major success, viral fan reactions to the sudden twists of its first episode only really spread through Japanese social media after the episode reached TV and streaming services, not during its open availability in cinemas.
That being said, the popularity of the original manga doesn’t mean that fans will turn up to the anime, especially when over 40 anime are being broadcast every season as we saw in the Spring 2023 season where Oshi no Ko premiered. Its recent live-action TV drama did the inverse of this, premiering on Amazon Prime in November before concluding its storyline exclusively in theaters in mid-December.
It’s unlikely many production committees would continue the practice if it wasn’t successful for them. The overall success and hunger for anime in cinemas is bringing fans to the market for everything from Attack on Titan compilation films to 60-minute adaptations of one shot manga like Look Back to original films and major adaptation like Totto-chan: The Little Girl by the Window.
As long as anime continues to dominate the market the way it is now, expect it to be yet another feather in the cap of production committees finding a path to profitability for their series on top of the still-lucrative streaming markets and more general merchandising, especially as a way to make up for declining home video sales. It’s a low-cost method of generating interest in a series that you are already producing. With more anime being produced than ever before, new TV anime need to do everything in order to stand out in a sea of also-rans. What better way to bring attention than the biggest screen possible?
