Anime Hit a Record $28.2 Billion in 2025, and Japan’s Home Market Grew Fast Too

Anime has to be one of the largest markets of “comics” type content out there. One that is, and was, extremely popular is One Piece. It was so popular that Netflix saw an opportunity and made it into a live-action series. Of course, I’m a fan of the show. The main thing about anime in general, for me, is how it pulls the reader or viewer into the scenes. You feel engulfed in the story line and can’t wait to see the next installment.

If you’ve never sat down with one, the closest everyday comparison I can offer is the difference between a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon and a long-running comic like Batman. A Bugs Bunny short is quick, self-contained, and built for laughs in under ten minutes. You watch it, you chuckle, you move on. Batman comics have more continuity and stakes, but even those usually resolve major arcs in a handful of issues. Anime is different. A single series can run for hundreds of episodes or dozens of manga volumes. The characters age, make irreversible choices, lose people, and keep going. The world gets bigger. You start caring about side characters the way you care about people in a novel. That is the engulfing part for me. Once you’re in, the next installment is not optional.

That kind of investment is showing up in the numbers. On Friday, October 30, 2026, the Association of Japanese Animations presented preliminary figures for 2025 at TIFFCOM, the market attached to the Tokyo International Film Festival, Variety reported. Worldwide spending on Japanese anime reached a record JPY4.45 trillion, which Variety converts to $28.2 billion. That is up 15.8 percent on the year before, and Variety says the rate of growth was also a record, edging past the 15.7 percent of 2024. The numbers are preliminary: the final ones are due in the 2026 edition of the report in December.

Overseas revenue climbed 17.2 percent to JPY2.54 trillion ($16.1 billion) and now makes up 57.1 percent of the total, up from 56.5 percent a year earlier, according to Variety’s account of the presentation. The local Japanese market grew 14.1 percent to JPY1.91 trillion ($12.1 billion). For years the home market had been the slower side of the story: local growth was 4.6 percent in 2024. In 2025 both sides grew strongly, which the report’s editor-in-chief, Hasegawa Masahiro, called a break from the old pattern.

The AJA also tracks a narrower number: revenue earned by the animation studios themselves. It rose 8.4 percent to a record JPY505.5 billion ($3.2 billion), slower than the 9.1 percent of 2024, and overseas business made up 27.9 percent of it, up from 25.5 percent. These are different measures, so we do not divide one by the other. Hasegawa noted that studios do not always deal directly with international partners, and said, “The idea of studios holding the rights to their own works and managing them to generate revenue is growing year by year,” Variety reports. He also said that abroad, anime has so far succeeded mainly as something to watch, and that the next phase is selling merchandise and services to fans worldwide. The Japanese government’s target is JPY6 trillion ($38.1 billion) in anime overseas sales by 2033, Variety reports.

One Piece shows up on both sides of this. In the figures Variety reports, Japanese anime make up 100 of the 300 TV series with the most user votes on IMDb, including nine of the top 20, and One Piece is No. 9. The live-action version is a different measure, and a more modest one. What’s on Netflix reports that Season 2 arrived on Tuesday, March 10, 2026, and drew 16.8 million views in its first six days, the top spot on Netflix’s global English-language TV chart that week. TheWrap also reported 16.8 million views and the No. 1 spot. Season 1 pulled 18.5 million over four days from Thursday, August 31, 2023, so Season 2 came in under it despite the two extra days, according to What’s on Netflix.

I keep coming back to that feeling of being pulled in. The market figures show the scale. The live-action numbers show that the stories travel. What the figures do not give us is the reason for the local jump. Variety’s account offers none, and Hasegawa cautioned that exchange rates and global conditions affect the comparison between home and abroad.

Those are the kinds of details that would help a reader who is trying to understand whether this is a one-year spike or a durable shift. The preliminary numbers are clear. The reasons behind the local surge and the long-term mix of titles are still worth more context. For anyone still on the outside looking in, the simplest way I can put it is this: anime is not a short cartoon you watch and forget. It is a story that keeps going, and a lot of people have decided they want to keep going with it.

Living article. Outreach to the Association of Japanese Animations, Toei Animation, and Netflix is in progress. Updates will be added as responses arrive.

About the illustrations: the anime-style picture at the top and the retro comic in the story were generated with AI (Grok Imagine) for this story. Both show the same invented scene; no real people, places or police departments are depicted.

Editor written. AI used for spelling and grammar only.