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NEWS: Demon Slayer Is Now the #2 Anime Film in the U.S. of All Time

With Covid restrictions and a small marketing campaign, that's extremely impressive!

I’m happy for the franchise

But I’m also wondering what it would take for an anime film to beat Pokémon’s First Movie numbers.

I’m happy for the franchise

But I’m also wondering what it would take for an anime film to beat Pokémon’s First Movie numbers.

I'd say Mugen Train + a large ad campaign. I remember back in the day the hype and promotion around Mewtwo Strikes Back was massive. The amount of advertising for that movie back then was enormous. Considering how relatively little marketing in the US Mugen Train received, I would imagine even half the marketing dollars push would have closed that ground tremendously, especially with how little competition there is for in the movie market right now.

Borderline impossible now, especially if you want to adjust for inflation. First pokemon movie was full on pokemania and had Warner Bros distributing it and bringing a huge marketing campaign to promote it, funimation is a small distributor, no way in hell could they compete with that.

Good point. Considering all of that and how it had a VERY limited theater release, the fact that Mugen Train still somehow made it #2 Anime Film of all time in the US is impressive. Maybe even miraculous.

If it came out under normal conditions, it may have had a chance.

Was it really more limited than any other anime movie not based on Pokemon or from Studio Ghibli? Around here it has gotten a longer run than any of the DBZ movies ever did. Other movies like One Piece: Stampede I had to make a 60 mile round trip to see. It is even playing in a local theater that I have never seen show anime before. Mugen Train has also been running daily which is something that never happens here.

’m really only going by how I had a few friends from other states who were disappointed that the theaters around them were still closed so they couldn’t see it. The only way most could was if they took a long drive. Circumstances are different for everyone.

I just checked Box Office Mojo and according to that site Mugen Train has played in about 800 more theaters than Dragon Ball Super: Broly despite the closures due to the pandemic. I really don't think it is fair to compare Demon Slayers theatrical success to any other anime movie because its theatrical run is so different than any anime film before it.

Hopefully Demon Slayers success leads to theaters giving future anime films more respect. It would be nice if they would give them regular runs even if its only for a week or two. I don't know how many films I had to miss do to them only showing them on Tuesday and Thursday nights when I had to work.

That’s interesting. Makes me wonder how that many theaters was possible. Maybe it’s cause movie releases were so limited that it left room for Mugen Train (or theaters were like “screw it, we got nothing else”), so it was able to be shown in more theaters than the usual anime movie. I’m not sure how companies would negotiate theater releases, but this all clearly worked in Demon Slayer’s favor.

Demon Slayer has been in the news lately, in more ways than one

I saw the story on Princess Latifa on the BBC and I did a double-take when I noticed the Demon Slayer promo image in the photo of her. It's so weird when real world news events intersect with anime like that. I feel like had the Demon Slayer movie not become such a phenomenon as a result of COVID and Hollywood pushing back so many of their movie premiers, probably a different movie would've served as the date stamp for that photo of Latifa.