2019: A revolutionary year for the US anime business
U.S. anime market matures in 2019
The Japan Times
The third annual Animation Is Film Festival kicked off on Oct. 18 in Los Angeles with the United States premiere of Makoto Shinkai’s latest Japan box-office hit, “Weathering With You,” followed by an onstage Q&A with Shinkai, who flew in from Tokyo for the event. Demand for tickets was so fierce that organizers added a second overflow screening at the city’s historic TCL Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard.
According to festival founder Eric Beckman, CEO of U.S. distributor GKIDS, tickets to the second screening sold out in “less than three minutes.”
WEATHERING WITH YOU, image courtesy of GKIDS / ©2019 “Weathering With You” Film Partners
Six years after the global anime industry was jolted by the retirement of its most loved and bankable artist, Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki, developments in the North American market are transforming 2019 into a banner year. Through consolidation, the flowering of streaming media platforms and unexpected cash infusions, the anime business on the other side of the Pacific is rising to new levels of maturation and scale.
The day before the festival, WarnerMedia announced that all Studio Ghibli films, which the studio had previously refused to release digitally, would be made available to stream on its HBO Max site, set for launch next spring. And, of course, Miyazaki himself is now out of retirement and working on his next film.
Dedicated distributors and streaming platforms Funimation and Crunchyroll, both absorbed over the past two years by bigger players, are now being repositioned for growth by their respective parent companies. This September, Sony merged Funimation, which it acquired in 2017, with its Tokyo-headquartered anime arm, Aniplex, expanding its reach to 49 countries in 10 languages. Crunchyroll, under the umbrella of AT&T, is currently being folded into WarnerMedia but will likely retain its stand-alone status as a home for anime among a wider range of entertainment options.
The Japanese government finally put some serious skin into the international anime game through its Cool Japan Fund, long-pilloried for being badly named and poorly managed. In August, the fund made a $30 million investment in Sentai Filmworks, an independent Texas-based North American licensing firm, best known for presenting hit titles such as K-On! and Ninja Scroll. The cash infusion will go toward supporting Sentai’s own freshly minted streaming platform, HIDIVE, an alternative to the Sony and Time Warner heavyweights.
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