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The world is primed and ready for the grand finale of the Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. For years, the series has been one of the biggest anime in the world, but the approaching Infinity Castle movie trilogy looks set to set records that the studio might not expect. While the Mugen Train movie remains the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, the Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle movies could prove more popular in the West than in Japan.

Research released over the summer of 2024 helps paint a picture of how the upcoming Demon Slayer movie will be received both in the West and in Japan. Specifically, it notes that the latest season of Demon Slayer – the Hashira Training arc – was significantly more popular in the US than it was in Japan. Demon Slayer skews so heavily toward the West now that it actually had to be excluded from the rest of the data or it would skew every table and make it unreadable.

The reason for this comes down to timing. The Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba manga ended in May 2020 when the final chapter and epilogue were published in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump. In October 2020, the Demon Slayer Mugen Train film was released in Japan, marking the pinnacle of the series’ popularity in Japan. Since then, it has declined slowly while the West has grown more in love with Tanjiro and his quest to return his sister to her human form.

Because more people in Japan read manga than watch anime, the ending of the Demon Slayer manga was the end of the story for many fans. Meanwhile, anime remains significantly more popular than manga in the US, which sets the stage for a potential shift in how anime movies are marketed and released. Ufotable, the studio that animates Demon Slayer, could (and should) capitalize on this unique dynamic among the anime’s fans and offer a simultaneous worldwide release of the Infinity Castle movies.

Typically, fans outside Japan have to wait months or even years to see anime movies on the big screen. Even The Boy and the Heron from a well-established studio like Ghibli was released in Japan five months before it got a widespread theatrical release in the US. However, Demon Slayer could break that trend. It isn’t just its popularity that makes this possible – the infrastructure is already in place to give Demon Slayer an international release alongside its Japanese theatrical run.

The international distributor of Demon Slayer is Aniplex, which is owned by Sony. Sony, as we’ve discussed before, has been making waves in the anime scene in the past several years. Even before their attempted purchase of Kadokawa, they completed their purchase of streaming site Crunchyroll back in 2021. Crunchyroll is not only the streaming home of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba; it also handles the theatrical releases of anime movies in international markets.

With that bit of insight into the business side of the international release of the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle movies, a potential future where Crunchyroll, Aniplex, and Sony bring Demon Slayer movies to international audiences at the same time as its Japanese release. Not only would this be a win for Crunchyroll and Sony at a time when they desperately need one, but it would also help improve the box office potential for each of the upcoming Demon Slayer movies. With fewer opportunities to pirate the movie and easier access to it, anime fans around the world would likely flock to the cinema to see Tanjiro and the Hashira take on Muzan Kibutsuji in his home.

Because of its unique popularity in the US versus in its native Japan and the distribution infrastructure around it, the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle moves have the potential to become one of the first anime movies to have a bigger box office overseas than in Japan.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
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• 2025 is the year One Punch Man season 3 finally adapts the cosmically weird Monster Association Arc and I can't wait