Demon Slayer Earns Highest Opening Ever For Anime Film in Domestic Box Office, Breaks Pokémon’s 26 Year Record

Infinity Castle’s debut gives it the sixth biggest September opening ever domestically. It’s also the biggest opening for an international film and the biggest opening for an R-rated animated film.

The movie, which is the first in a trilogy that will close out the uber-popular anime series, has also been doing extremely well in Japan, having passed Spirited Away this weekend as the second-highest-grossing film in the country’s box-office history, as it reached $213 million domestically. The first slot belongs to Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train, which made over $365 million in Japan (during COVID, no less). Infinity Castle opened in Japan on July 18, then premiered in several Southeast Asian countries in August, and is finally rolling out to the rest of the world over the last weekend and the upcoming one.

The anime is based on Koyoharu Gotouge’s extremely popular manga, which ran for 23 volumes between 2016 and 2020. Ufotable’s adaptation began in 2019 and ran on TV for 63 episodes before switching exclusively to the big screen with this Infinity Castle trilogy. Frankly, Mugen Train’s explosive popularity is likely a big part of the reason why this final arc is being adapted for theaters instead of for the small screen like most of the rest of the series; at least according to its box office numbers, audiences seem to mostly be fine with that.