Despite everyone and there mother entering the Streaming Wars, the movie industry is still ruled by box office numbers and rental sales. While consistent money is nice to have, nothing makes a studio more happy than to receive extra dollars on top of the money that is expected to come in. And when it comes to box office, something that is well known in the industry is that if you are making an animated movie for theatrical release, make sure it’s a family or kids film. Yet thanks to recent anime hits (particularly from Crunchyroll) this mindset is slowly being challenged.
While animation for adults has had far more bombs than hits, with recent anime success stories there is a mindset that is changing. Aside from anime being taken more seriously as a viable business for movie theaters to get into, it is having a domino affect that is making major animation studios taking a second look at making animation for adults. Let’s discuss the history of animation at the box office, and why the success of anime at the box office is good news for animation fans in general.
Disney’s Dominant Success
While animation has always had a place at the box office, with rare exceptions, most of the 1920s through 1990s were dominated by Disney films. Occasionally there would be an animated hit like The Care Bears Movie and An American Tale, however for the most part if there was a hit animated movie, it was a Disney movie. This meant that if you wanted to make an animated feature film for the theaters, chances are it was going to be a G-rated musical that would invoke the feelings of watching a Disney movie.
Limited PG-13 Success Stories
If you attempted to make a movie outside the G-rated formula, chances are you would be throwing your money away. While Ralph Bakshi was able to make some waves with the R-rated American Pop, PG-rated The Lord of the Rings, and X-rated Fritz the Cat, the vast majority of PG-13 or higher films simply bombed. Few people remember the PG-rated Starchaser: The Legend of Orin or the PG-13-rated 9 (despite being produced by Tim Burton). The PG-13 hybrid comedy Cool World was anything but, while Disney’s own first attempt at a PG-rated animated film for adults – The Black Cauldron – almost bankrupted the studio.
The PG-13-rated ‘family comedy’ Bebe’s Kids dropped like a bomb while the similarly rated Princess Mononoke almost cost US fans the rest of the Studio Ghibli films. Sure there’s the occasional success story like the PG-13-rated The Simpsons Movie and the R-rated South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, but for the most part adult animation is considered box office poison, known more for toppling studios (as is the case with Titan A.E. and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) rather than earning studios a sizable profit. While the box office has been kinder to PG-rated films, any animated film with PG-13 or higher is still considered the movie equivalent to lighting money on fire.
Anime’s Recent Box Office Success
If you thought it was though for a PG-13-rated American animated film to make money at the box office, try being an anime film. While anime films like Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocense, Escaflowne: The Movie, Metropolis, and the vast majority of Studio Ghibli films were released in theaters, most of them failed to crack the $1 million dollar mark. Those that did certainly didn’t reach $10 million. While small releases for Oscar consideration was considered a necessary evil, most of these were regulated to one night Fathom Event releases (where even those weren’t sold out most of the time).
This started to change when Funimation (now Crunchyroll) decided to start making inroads to releasing more anime films theatrically. Their first major push came with the PG-rated Your Name, a movie that was critically acclaimed but didn’t move the needle much in America, topping out at $5.1 million after a three-month run (Japan was a totally different story). When the PG-rated Dragon Ball Super: Brolly was given a 1,000 screen launch and made almost $10 million dollars, it convinced Funimation to continue releasing anime in theaters. Sony took notice of this success and released the R-rated Demon Slayer: The Movie to stunning box office success: the film opened to $19.5 million and ended the run with a truly unexpected $49.5 million total gross in the states.
Later the PG-13-rated Jujutsu Kaisen 0 crushed box office expectations by opening with $17.6 million and ending with over $31 million, beating Dragon Ball Super: Brolly’s total box office run. Not to be outdone, Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero would open with a little over $20 million dollars on the opening weekend and to date has grossed around $38.1 million dollars despite having a PG-13 rating. Most recently One Piece: Red opened with $9.5 million. That’s a bit of a letdown, but considering it’s also a PG-13 film based on a show that is primarily considered a family show (with undubbed songs to boot), and it’s one more example that anime is no longer box office poison.
What this Means for the Future of Adult Animation
While these box office results are good news for anime films, it has also turned heads at major studios who are looking to expand making adult animation profitable. There is talk that Sony is now considering letting their upcoming Spider-Man: Across the Multiverse movies enter into PG13-rated territory (after mandating some edits to get the first film to be PG). Illumination Animation, the studio behind family friendly hits like Sing, The Secret Life of Pets, and the Minions movies, recently recruited executive from Netflix to form a new animation studio that would make films for adult audiences: Moonlight.
As for Netflix themselves, they are committed to making adult animation (as their recent Wendell & Wild proves), but now that they are dipping their toe in the theatrical game with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Tale, it seems inevitable that more of these adult animated features are going to start showing up in movie theaters. There are still hurdles to overcome in this area; The Bob’s Burgers Movie was rated PG-13 and certainly didn’t make enough money to be considered profitable, but the more successful these PG-13 and R-rated anime movies are the more studios will continue to realize that so long as the budget is reasonable, animation for adult audiences CAN be profitable in the future!