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Despite being off the air for nearly a decade, anime fans still have a healthy appetite for all things Naruto. In fact, according to new figures, Naruto and Boruto have soared past the likes of One Piece, Demon Slayer, and even Pokémon to become the most-watched anime on Netflix in the second half of 2024. Fans clearly can’t get enough of the plucky ninja from the Hidden Leaf Village.

The analysis comes via Pascal J. Bonnet, a former executive director at Viz Media who has gone on to set up his own consulting firm for anime and manga publishers. He crunched the numbers in the What We Watched report and found that more hours of Naruto were watched on Netflix in the second half of 2024 than any other anime on the platform. 330 million hours of Naruto were streamed by Netflix subscribers, surpassing the 316 million hours of One Piece. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba was a distant third with 208 million hours streamed globally.

The full top ten figures are:

• Naruto – 330 million hours
• One Piece – 316 million hours
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – 208 million hours
• Pokémon – 170 million hours
• Black Clover – 138 million hours
• Hunter x Hunter – 138 million hours
• The Seven Deadly Sins – 128 million hours
• My Hero Academia – 127 million hours
• Dan Da Dan – 97 million hours
• Jujutsu Kaisen – 87 million hours

Obviously, Naruto’s figures are aided by the fact that there are a lot of episodes to watch – many of them filler, but still. The fact that it has overtaken One Piece for the last six months of 2024 is probably because a new batch of episodes of Naruto was added to Netflix in many markets, which spurred many fans to pick the series up again. 2025 is going to be an interesting year for these figures, as One Piece season 2 finally gets a release date and the first of the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle movies comes out.

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... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
• Why is One Piece more popular now that the anime is 25 years old? We asked around and found out
• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba
• 2025 is the year One Punch Man season 3 finally adapts the cosmically weird Monster Association Arc and I can't wait