Why Chainsaw Man – The Movie’s Success Could Have An Outsized Impact On the Anime Industry

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 30, 2025 | 10:26am

Anime Features Chainsaw Man

Why Chainsaw Man – The Movie’s Success Could Have An Outsized Impact On the Anime Industry

During its opening weekend in the U.S., Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc came out on top of the domestic box office with $17.25 million. It was only the fourth anime film to ever do so. As of the time of writing, it has grossed about $110.5 million worldwide after topping Japan’s box office and ending Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle’s several-month run at #1 there (that film has earned over $666.9 million worldwide).

While Chainsaw Man fans eager to see the rest of the series animated are likely quite happy about the news, you may be skeptical as to why this is a big deal. First of all, in a vacuum, you could argue that Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc’s numbers may not seem all that impressive; just this year, Infinity Castle earned six times as much.

That said, an essential piece of context here is that the Reze Arc was made for a modest reported production budget of only $4 million. Even accounting for other costs, it has turned a massive profit.

You may also be a bit skeptical about the news because of an ongoing tedious culture of obsessing over box office numbers and film performances. On top of this, plenty of anime series seem to do quite well, either on streaming or in theaters, only for it to take years for a follow-up, if we get one at all. One of the best modern examples is that, at the height of its popularity, it took four years for a second season of Attack on Titan to come out.

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However, the big difference between Chainsaw Man and many other modern anime productions is how it was financed: basically, the animation studio behind the series, MAPPA, fronted the costs itself. As a result, it reaped almost all of the profits. While it may seem natural for the studio that creates a piece of art to receive most of the returns, this is not at all the norm for the industry. And perhaps most importantly, MAPPA’s seeming success with both the Chainsaw Man TV series and this latest movie could have a ripple effect, causing other studios to follow in its footsteps.

That said, before explaining how things can change, it’s important to establish how it’s worked until now. For the last few decades, most anime have been financed via a “production committee,” which is a collection of companies that come together to fund an anime. Each company on the committee contributes to the budget, with its contribution generally corresponding to its influence over the production and the share of the profit it receives.

This comes with pros and cons for the studios. As for benefits, they don’t have to worry about raising huge amounts of money to front the budget, and they also don’t have to worry about losing millions if their show is a fiscal bomb. However, this obviously also comes with many downsides, such as not immediately benefiting from a series that explodes in popularity. Additionally, since the production committee fronts the cost, they’re the ones who determine the budget (which trickles down to animators’ salaries) and can weigh in to influence the content of the work.

In extreme cases, a production committee can change animation studios altogether. A perfect example of this is One Punch Man: the first season was animated by Madhouse, which brought in an all-star lineup that heightened the show’s action-comedy with incredible animation. However, when Madhouse was too busy to produce season 2 in the time frame the production committee wanted, they chose to move on to JC Staff, a studio with less impressive animation connections that also chronically overschedules its staff. As a result, the fall-off in animation quality between the first season of the show and the next two is as stark as you’re ever likely to see.

While it’s not uncommon for an anime studio to be a member of the production committee, contributing to the budget and reaping some of its profits, it’s quite rare for a studio to “front” the committee (contributing the most to the budget). It’s even rarer still for a project to forgo a committee altogether, with this generally only being done by massive corporations producing a series themselves or in edge cases.

That’s what makes MAPPA’s case of foregoing a production committee so unusual; while the studio has produced many incredibly popular series, like Attack on Titan and Jujutsu Kaisen, it hasn’t been around for particularly long compared to many other studios, having been founded in 2011. With the company making the move, it’s very possible that other studios of a similar size may consider doing the same.

Many would likely be eager to see the change, because some in the industry have blamed the production committee format for why many animators are paid so poorly. Despite an ongoing boom in anime’s popularity, this hasn’t dramatically improved most animators’ quality of life.

In an ideal world, moving away from the production committee format could potentially result in studios becoming more profitable, which could then result in animators being compensated more appropriately. Perhaps most importantly, these studios could potentially hire more in-house animators.

Most animators in the industry work on a freelance basis. While many studios have at least some in-house animators, very few animation teams are made up almost entirely of full-time employees, with some of the main exceptions to this being Kyoto Animation and Studio Ghibli—and it’s no coincidence that these two studios are frequently described as producing some of the best-looking animation in the industry.

Kyoto Animation, in particular, is known for having dramatically better working conditions than virtually all of its peers, with a robust training program, more reasonable hours, higher wages, and a focus on gender equality. These conditions have allowed its creatives to flourish and consistently create some truly breathtaking work. It’s quite likely that one of the primary reasons the studio is able to afford this is because it is almost always a member of the production committees on its shows; the studio’s reputation for producing quality series has given it a loyal fanbase, something it’s actually able to profit from.

Now it’s important to note that while MAPPA has made a big move in financing Chainsaw Man itself, the idea that it could cause a positive chain reaction for the industry is a bit ironic given its many controversies. In 2021, the company was accused of paying bottom rates for freelancers. And while that was before it started forgoing production committees on some of its shows, there have also been more recent controversies, like when several animators on the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen broke NDA to complain about the studio’s toxic work environment that led to crunch conditions and poor scheduling, which resulted in noticeable drops in animation quality throughout the season.

So while Chainsaw Man has granted the company large profits, its exploitative work culture likely comes from the top. With much of the same executive team in charge of the company, I’m skeptical that MAPPA’s work conditions will improve anytime soon, even with improved profit margins.

However, despite this, the company’s move to self-finance this series could have major consequences for the industry writ large, as it could very likely inspire many other studios to forgo the production committee model. MAPPA apparently secured the money to produce Chainsaw Man through something called “bridge-financing,” where an investment company lends them money. In this case, they were financed by the Cool Japan Fund, a government soft-power initiative aimed at spreading Japanese culture.

While getting an investment firm to front the costs sounds virtually the same as a production committee, the difference is that once the studio has paid back its investor, it retains the rest of the profits. A former exec from MAPPA, Makoto Kimura, was so sure this was the future of the industry that he left MAPPA to found his own company, BLUE RIGHTS, which would be involved in bridge-financing.

Admittedly, all of this is a band-aid to a larger problem: an economic system where workers are regularly squeezed for their surplus labor. The anime industry just happens to be a more extreme case of capitalism gone amok than most other spaces, meaning even a marginal improvement could go a long way.

But while moving away from production committees certainly won’t solve these deeper underlying issues, it could lead to improvements across the industry, removing one layer of corporations that extract profits. Abandoning production committees would certainly make things riskier for studios in some cases, but it would allow these companies to actually benefit from the ongoing anime boom, potentially leading to better conditions for employees and a less volatile industry full of freelancers hoping to land a tiny pool of full-time jobs. It still wouldn’t be perfect, but when you’re starting from rock bottom, improvements aren’t hard to come by.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.