By Emmanuel King
Japan's anime industry has set another record, and for the third straight year the majority of its money was made outside Japan. The Association of Japanese Animations presented the preliminary findings of its Anime Industry Report 2026 at TIFFCOM in Tokyo on Friday, putting the total market at 4.49 trillion yen, about $28.5 billion, in 2025. That is a rise of 15.8 percent over 2024, the fastest growth rate the association has recorded, and the first time the industry has crossed the 4 trillion yen line. The final figures will be published in the full report in December.
The split tells the story. Overseas revenue climbed 17.2 percent to 2.54 trillion yen, about $16.1 billion, accounting for 57.1 percent of the entire market. The domestic Japanese market had its own strong year, rising 14.1 percent to 1.91 trillion yen, about $12.1 billion, after a flat 2024, but the center of gravity has moved. Overseas sales first passed domestic sales in 2020, and the gap has widened every year since. The association's figures cover the full value chain: television, film, streaming and video, licensing, merchandise, music and live events.
The year's engine was a single film. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, The Movie: Infinity Castle grossed around $800 million worldwide, including roughly 40 billion yen in Japan, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time. Masahiro Hasegawa, editor-in-chief of the annual industry report, told attendees that Japanese animation has entered an era in which ranking at the top of international box office charts and global streaming services is no longer uncommon, and that he expects Japanese companies to keep expanding abroad. He also noted, fairly, that exchange rates and global conditions move the comparisons. AJA president Kazuko Ishikawa opened the session with the emphasis on the people who make the work. The market has nearly tripled since the association began publishing figures in 2002.
One number inside the report deserves a slower read. Revenue flowing directly to animation studios rose 8.4 percent to a record 505.5 billion yen, about $3.2 billion, growing more slowly than the consumer market around it. Domestic clients still supply the bulk of studio income, some 364.7 billion yen of it, but contracts from overseas clients contributed 140.8 billion yen, a record share of 27.9 percent, and that share has been setting records precisely because foreign commissioners now order Japanese animation at a scale they never used to. The growth rate itself made history as well: at 15.8 percent, the total market expanded faster than in any year the association has measured, edging past the 15.7 percent recorded in 2024. In other words, the audience boom is real, the production business is healthy, and the two are not growing at the same speed. Tokyo is planning around the gap: under the government's IP360 initiative, Japan is targeting 20 trillion yen in overseas content sales by 2033, with anime expected to deliver 6 trillion yen of it.
For actors, and especially for voice actors, the overseas majority changes what the job is. When 57 percent of the money is earned outside Japan, the English-language version of a series or film is not an afterthought; it is a primary commercial product, released day and date with the original and judged by the audience that now pays most of the bills. That means more dubbing work, faster dubbing schedules built around simultaneous global releases, and casting that treats dub leads as marquee names rather than substitutes. A theatrical hit on the scale of Infinity Castle arrives in American cinemas with its dub cast promoted alongside the film, which would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It also means the contract questions follow the money. Dubbing and television animation work for American performers sits under SAG-AFTRA's animation agreements, the same corner of the union's contract family whose recent ratification TAG readers followed this fall. A global boom is good news for the volume of sessions, the number of series ordered and the leverage of the actors audiences now follow from dub to dub. But the AJA's own numbers carry the caution: consumer spending on anime grew nearly twice as fast as the revenue reaching studios. Where the money pools, and what share of it reaches the performers whose voices carry these titles across languages, will be decided in negotiations, not at the box office. The audience has already voted. The industry it built is now worth $28.5 billion a year, and the voices are a growing part of the product it sells.