More anime
than ever, more audience than ever, more titles, more platforms, more
everything. And yet, several of the industry's biggest companies are closing
their fiscal reports with deficits or steep declines in profits. If that sounds
contradictory, it's because it is, and it has a name: "boom
without profits." This is exactly how a survey by Imperial Data
Bank describes the current state of the anime production market in Japan.
How you
produce more and earn less at the same time
The problem
has several layers, but the most visible is money. For years, streaming
platforms paid licensing fees that in many cases covered between 80 and
100 percent of production costs. It was a comfortable model: you produced,
you delivered, and the platform absorbed most of the risk. That period, which
the article calls the "delivery bubble," is reaching its limit.
Platforms are no longer raising their rates at the same rate, which means
studios have to recoup rising costs by other means: international sales,
events, physical products. Those who know how to do that well build solid
businesses. Those who do not, see how their point of balance is moving further
and further away.
At the same
time, domestic costs are rising steadily. The shortage of animators is real,
outsourcing is becoming more expensive, and companies like Kadokawa accumulated
significant goodwill after acquiring studios such as ENGI, Kinema Citrus and
Video Kobo, which raised their profitability threshold per project. Japan's
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has already noted that the amount of
anime production has reached the limit of the sector's current capacity. In
other words: the industry is producing as much as it can, and that is
not enough to make the numbers add up.
The
negative results are not from minor studies. Kadokawa, Pony Canyon,
anime divisions of the TBS Group, and ABC Animation reported difficult
results. Studio KAI, responsible for the third season of Uma Musume,
also recorded notable drops. Toho and Toei Animation showed mixed
results. MAPPA's case with Chainsaw Man illustrates
the other extreme: the studio covered the production costs out of its own
pocket to keep the rights and build an independent business around the title.
It is a bet that can pay very well or be very expensive.
There's
another factor that the industry has been ignoring for too long: the overproduction
of isekai. Platforms still consider the genre as a reliable generator of
views, but the number of titles available has dispersed the audience so much
that success rates fell noticeably. With too many isekai vying for the same
attention, the traditional media mix model, where anime drives sales of manga,
light novels, and products, becomes much harder to execute. This pressure has
been building for about three years, but the current volume is amplifying it.
The article
warns of a seemingly obvious solution that could make things worse: simply
reducing the amount of production. The argument is that if Japan leaves gaps in
the global market, studios from other countries — such as Korea's
Studio Mir — are perfectly positioned to fill them. The answer is not
to produce less, but to produce better and with smarter distribution and
licensing strategies. Anime as an industry isn't dying, but the period
when producing and selling was almost automatic is definitely over.
