Crunchyroll is known for offering the latest anime shows on its streaming service. But arguably its hottest upcoming title is one that Mitchel Berger, executive vice president of global commerce at the streamer, is bringing out exclusively to theaters: “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle.”
For the uninitiated, “Demon Slayer” is a massively popular anime about an organization that specializes in hunting demons in Taishō-era Japan. The show follows main character Tanjiro Kamado, who wants revenge after his family is massacred and his sister is turned into a demon. It sounds dark, but the show features a nice mix of action, humor and gorgeous animation.
“Infinity Castle,” which has already grossed more than $200 million around the world, is the first of a trilogy of films that promises to conclude the “Demon Slayer” story. To get a sense of what this means for fans, imagine if “Game of Thrones” ended its adaptation with a series of films instead of the rushed last few seasons.
“Infinity Castle” also follows Crunchyroll’s move to release an earlier “Demon Slayer” film, “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train” back in 2021. Coming in the wake of the pandemic, with audiences still a little leery about public gatherings, it was a surprise hit with nearly $50 million at the U.S. box office and $470 million worldwide.
Berger, who manages theatrical releases, merchandise sales and many of the non-streaming aspects of Crunchyroll, talked to TheWrap about how the success of “Mugen Train” led to the release of “Infinity Castle,” why he believes streaming and theatrical releases can co-exist, and when he sees anime hitting total mainstream awareness.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of our interview:
You’ve been in the media business for a long time. Tell me about your journey to Crunchyroll.
I wanted to be a rock star and that didn’t quite work out for me, so I actually swerved into the record business. But then I ended up in the film business with Universal, so I spent 21 years there, which was a great experience. I loved it, had an amazing time, but got to a point where I was looking for something different. The opportunity came up with Funimation, at the time Sony bought Funimation and with Crunchyroll brought us together. One of the things that was really interesting to me about the opportunity was it was going to give me the opportunity to do more stuff. I could do home entertainment and theatrical and consumer products and things like that. But really, the bigger, more interesting thing I loved about it was the fandom. I’m a massive “Star Wars” fan and I love pop culture movies. But most of those fandoms are tied to an IP. You’re a “Star Trek” fan or you’re a “Harry Potter” fan. But what I love about anime is that the core fandom is of the medium itself. By being a fan of just anime as a storytelling mechanism and an art style and a medium, it opens up all these different things. There’s always content that you can dive into and you can explore.
Were you an anime fan going into this job?
I was not a hardcore fan coming in. I’m an ’80s kid, so I grew up watching “Star Blazers” and “G-Force: Guardians of Space” and things like that. I didn’t know they were anime, I just knew they were cool shows. But by being a fan myself, I understood what it was like to be a true fan of this medium and really care about it, so that helped me bridge the gap. But the other thing that really helped me is my kids. When I started, my son was 14 years old and my daughter was 10 years old. My son was just discovering anime at school. So I learned a lot about anime, initially, through my kids and me joining Funimation at the time. You know, for all the cool stuff I got to do at Universal, it wasn’t until I got into anime that my kids thought what I did was cool at all. There’s lots of things within anime that I love and I would consider myself an anime fan today.
It’s funny that you bring up your son, because I noticed my grade school-age boys are now going to a lot of “One Piece”-themed birthday parties. Do you think anime is approaching mainstream, even from a generational perspective?
You hit it right on the head, which is it is changing as the generations change. There are tons of Gen Z and older fans who grew up with it, that love it, that have been with it for years. But what we’re really seeing is, when you look at Gen Z, Gen Alpha and folks your son’s age, it’s just part of life. It’s just part of their cultural awareness. We just did a study with NRG, and we did a deep dive into fans. We talked to teens and 93% of them were proud to be anime fans. Eighty-eight percent of them said it was an important part of their identity. Eighty-two percent of them said it helped shape their outlook on life. It speaks to them and it helps them express who they are.
Crunchyroll had a surprise hit in 2021 with “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train.” Talk about how that happened.
It was a great confluence of events where “Demon Slayer” itself had grown exponentially. It really resonated with fans during the pandemic. I think people had a really great opportunity to consume it and live with it and really become passionate about it coming out of the pandemic. “Demon Slayer” itself is such a cinematic piece of content that I think it naturally lends itself to a theater experience. It plays incredibly well on the big screen. The bigger piece, though, is when you look at the anime community, it really is about community. The anime community itself really does love to not only connect online, which there’s a lot of, but also in person. When you look at conventions or cosplay meetups or things like that, people use anime as a way to connect and make real-world connections and lifelong friends. What happened was, during the pandemic, we all lost that human connection. We all lost that opportunity to get together in person, and it’s such a core part of the anime experience that as soon as we got to “Mugen Train,” that was everyone’s opportunity to get together again with everyone and say, “I’ve missed you guys.” It was the perfect opportunity for everybody to come together. Even post-pandemic I’ve talked a lot about why the theatrical experience itself is great, because not everybody can get to a convention. Not everybody can get to something like Anime Expo or Comic-Con. It’s just not feasible for everybody around the world to do that, but everybody can get to a local cinema. You get that same rush. You get that same feeling of community connectedness. It was the first time that I had, from a theatrical standpoint, put an anime film out, and I had a lot of my old connections in traditional Hollywood coming back to me, who were like, “Where did this come from?”
Did the success of “Mugen Train” change the calculation on theatrical releases versus putting the content on Crunchyroll, which is the core business?
It proved that there is a cinematic experience that is valuable, that it is not cannibalistic of a streaming experience. The show was available in the service after it came out theatrically, the movie obviously was available on the service, but the theatrical experience itself is a different, unique moment in time. You know, anytime you go to a theater, you’re a unique participant in that experience that will never be replicated. You can’t replicate that at home. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to watch it again at home. It’s a fundamentally different experience. The other thing that we proved is that we’re going more mainstream. There’s a massive audience for anime out there, and fans will show up, and great content will fill up theaters. So we’ve had a string of successes now coming out, with three of the five highest-grossing anime films of all time in the U.S. have come out post-pandemic in like the last two or three years. That talks about the sustainable growth we’ve had.
You’ve got “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” coming up. What lessons did you learn from “Mugan Train” and the subsequent anime theatrical releases that you’re applying to this release?
First and foremost, we have a massive “Demon Slayer” fanbase that’s only grown since “Mugen Train,” and that’s our starting point. It’s making sure that the folks who are “Demon Slayer” fans know that the movie’s coming out. We’re very fortunate, because the fanbase is very educated. They’re very, very clued into what’s going on. These three films that are coming out are kind of the culmination of the manga arc of the “Demon Slayer” story. You can only see them in theaters. I think it was a really great opportunity to make this a cinematic experience. So making sure people understand that this year, the only place you can see “Demon Slayer” is on the big screen. Getting that message out there is critically important. We’re trying to make sure that everyone has access to this film as much as they can, because seeing it on the big screen is going to be a truly unique experience.
That’s interesting, since the legacy media companies traditionally tied to theatrical had been bringing movies to streaming, but you’ve got this reverse dynamic where you’re bringing this movie to theaters, despite coming from streaming. Talk about that.
Streaming and the theatrical experience are not cannibalistic. They’re not fundamentally at odds with each other. They are fundamentally different experiences when marketed the right way. There’s a place for both of those. There’s a halo that comes out of doing a promotion right now where we’re re-watching the entire “Demon Slayer” series. We’re making it available on the (ad-based tier) for people to watch for free. It’s a great experience to come in and experience the community on the streaming service. We did this with “Jujutsu Kaisen.” We did this with “Demon Slayer.” You can create a franchise from a streaming perspective. Then you can come and have a film as part of its life cycle, and then you can have subsequent seasons. And again, I don’t think that fans themselves have to just live in a box of one way of consuming content. That’s one of the things that we’ve done, uniquely in anime, that I love, is trying to move people back and forth and again; not make those windows at odds with each other, but use them to promote each other and have this virtuous circle of flywheel of the fan experience.
Are you marketing beyond the fanbase for this film? Is there a prospect for general audiences to check this out?
It’s open for everyone. For sure, we invite everybody to come and enjoy it. The “Demon Slayer” fanbase is a starting point for us, because they’re familiar with the story. This movie is a continuation of a very long journey. As a “Demon Slayer” fan, I would love to have new people come in and watch the film, because it’s an incredible piece of content. What I would love to ask them to do is look at whether it’s on our AVOD tier. Come subscribe to Crunchyroll, dive into the “Demon Slayer” universe, so you can really enjoy this for the rich experience that it is.
You talked about the anime fandom being about the medium, and in that sense, Crunchyroll has more of a community feel to it than other streamers. Can you talk about the thinking that goes into fostering that community?
We have very robust social engagement across all of our social channels, whether it’s the Crunchyroll official channels or some of the IP channels that we manage. What I love about our fans is that they talk to us. They want to have a two-way conversation. Whether it’s online, from a social perspective, TikTok or X or Facebook or Instagram, wherever it is, there’s a robust conversation that goes on there. But also, we attend a lot of conventions every year. We’re obviously at (Anime Expo) or Anime Japan or Comic-Con. There’s a ton of conversations that go on there as well. I love the fact that, in person, it’s not just this transactional ‘show up, go through the booth, get a piece of swag.’ The fans want to talk. What are you doing? What do we like to see? For me, what always amazes me is I travel all over the world, and without fail, whether I’m in the airport, a restaurant, wherever, if I take out my credit card to pay for something and the person looks at it and sees Crunchyroll on it, invariably, I’ll get somebody go, is that the Crunchyroll? And it’s like you’ve opened this door and turned on a light, and they want to just spend as long as you’ll sit there and talk to them about my favorite show. It’s like this green light to share this passion with you. It’s a great kind of feedback circle, where we can hear what’s working and what’s not.
Looking ahead, what are some projects that excite you?
There’s a lot of stuff that we’re working on that I can’t talk about, unfortunately, that I’m excited about. But one of the things that we did announce that I’m really excited about is a co-production for “Ghost of Tsushima,” which is based on a very popular PlayStation game. That’s something that we’re working on that I’m really excited to see how that plays out and how it comes down the pike. It’s a great piece of game content to begin with, lends itself very well to that storytelling. I’ll just tell you that we have some really cool things that we’re working on for the next couple of years, and I’m going to leave it at that so that I don’t get myself in trouble.
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” opens in theaters on Sept. 12.
