This past weekend, Sony/Crunchyroll’s “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” became the biggest anime hit in American box office history and will become one of Sony’s highest-grossing films of all time, right as it is set to join the Chinese animated megahit “Ne Zha 2” on the top 10 annual charts for 2025 worldwide.
As “Demon Slayer” keeps rolling in the dough with a $70 million domestic total and more than $400 million worldwide, it is likely to pass summer blockbusters like “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” and “Superman,” two offerings from a superhero genre that had the world in its grasp for more than a decade. But in Asia, anime and other local fare are dominating those markets.
The shift underscores the fading power and cachet of the Hollywood blockbuster in Asia, once a critical engine of box office revenue for the U.S. entertainment industry. It’s a dynamic driven by the gaps in films created by the COVID pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes mixed with the rising power of entertainment coming out of countries like South Korea and Japan.
In 2019, all 10 of the highest grossing films of the year were from Motion Picture Association member studios, and the top six took more than 60% of their global gross from outside the United States. So far this year, only two of the nine MPA films in the top 10 have that same foreign share: Universal’s “Jurassic World Rebirth” with 60.6% and Warner Bros./Apple’s “F1” with 69%. By comparison, “Superman” and “Fantastic Four” have foreign shares of 42.5% and 47.3% respectively.
Another example of the move away from Hollywood: in his company’s latest earnings call, Imax CEO Rich Gelfond noted that non-Hollywood films comprised 40% of Imax’s box office for the first half of 2025 in large part because of “Ne Zha 2,” but also because of the premium format company’s focus on bringing more local language fare to theaters around the world.
Prior to this year, that percentage had never exceeded 20% for any given half, and so far Imax has grossed $316 million from screenings of local language films, shattering the record of $243 million recorded in 2023.
Daniel Loria, senior vice president of content strategy at Boxoffice, said the global box office had to adapt to the disruptive last few years. Countries like Japan and South Korea that already had mature local film industries leaned more on what they were producing to fill in the gaps left behind by Hollywood, and realized they didn’t need U.S. blockbusters as much.
“Most countries that have developed a robust local film industry have been able to rebound faster after the pandemic by being able to easily fill in the gaps Hollywood leaves behind,” Loria said. “And that makes those industries far more competitive than they were before the pandemic when Hollywood comes back.
China’s transition to a locally-driven market was helped along by its government reducing the number of Hollywood films approved for release in 2021. As TheWrap noted back in April, only eight Hollywood films have grossed more than $100 million in China in the past four years, and the highest grossing film there so far this year is “Jurassic World: Rebirth” with just $79 million.
But other countries didn’t need officials putting their thumb on the scale to make that transition to local fare. Economic imperatives did that on their own.
Japan is a prime example, as in 2024 only two Hollywood movies, Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” and Illumination’s “Despicable Me 4,” cracked the top 10 highest grossing films in that year, with “Inside Out 2” being the highest MPA film with $34.3 million in the No. 7 spot.
The highest grossing live-action Hollywood film in Japan was “Wonka” with $15.4 million, less than a third of the $50 million grossed by the highest grossing Japanese-produced film of 2024, “Kingdom 4: Return of the Great General,” which was produced by Toho with Sony Pictures International handling distribution.
In 2025, that trend has largely continued with seven of the top 10 highest grossing films in Japan so far being local films, with “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” earning an all-time record $213 million. “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” holds the top Hollywood spot at No. 5 with $35.7 million, just ahead of “Moana 2” with $35 million.
Korea is somewhat more balanced, with four of the top 10 for 2025 being Hollywood titles including the No. 1 with $38.9 million, “F1.” Just behind it is the local horror comedy “My Daughter Is a Zombie,” which sits at $38.2 million . Other top grossers from Hollywood in Korea include “Jurassic World Rebirth,” “Mission: Impossible 8,” and “Mickey 17,” the latter being Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho’s first film since his Oscar triumph with “Parasite.”
And then there’s Vietnam, where the top 5 highest grossing films of all time have been released since the pandemic with the top 3 coming out in the last 18 months. The highest grossing film in Vietnamese history, the war film “Red Rain,” is still in theaters with $21.2 million grossed and counting. That’s nearly double the $11.7 million that “Avengers: Endgame” grossed there before inflation adjustment.
With audiences in many parts of the world opting more for films made by and for their culture rather than the global four-quadrant fare coming from the U.S., it’s clear that the days of as many as nine films hitting $1 billion worldwide in a year, as they did in 2019, may be a thing of the past unless more Chinese productions join “Ne Zha 2” in becoming record-smashing hits in their home country. Aside from the $1.9 billion of that film, the only other $1 billion grosser so far this year is Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch,” though “Zootopia 2” has a strong chance to reach that mark while “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is a virtual lock to do so.
So if $800 million is the new $1 billion for studios, that will put even more pressure on Hollywood to budget their tentpoles accordingly and to get the most post-theatrical value out of those films as library additions, merch sellers and streaming service draws.
But what remains to be seen is how these changing overseas markets react if and when Hollywood returns to releasing 80 to 90 wide release films per year compared to the 65 to 70 that it is releasing now. It seemed as if the film industry was getting back to that rate as Amazon MGM committed to filling in the distribution slot left behind by 20th Century Fox’s acquisition of Disney.
But with Paramount now reported to be putting forth a bid to acquire the entirety of Warner Bros. Discovery, the possibility of Hollywood’s theatrical output remaining permanently capped by consolidation is very real. Four legacy studios plus Amazon MGM will not be able to deliver the number of films that the industry once put forth in the 2010s, leaving plenty of opportunities for studios from Toho to CJ Entertainment to fill in the gaps.
