Anime continues to gain popularity around the world, and along with it, the amount of money viewers are willing to spend on their favorite works is growing. According to preliminary data from the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA), in 2025 the global Japanese animation market reached a record 4.45 trillion yen (about $28.2 billion), increasing by 15.8% over the year. The calculation includes not only films and TV series, but also merchandise, music, and events.
More than half of this sum was generated by fans outside Japan. The overseas market grew by 17.2% to $16.1 billion and now accounts for 57.1% of the total volume. But what is most interesting is that anime has begun to grow faster in its homeland as well: spending by the Japanese audience increased by 14.1% to $12.1 billion, whereas a year earlier the growth was just 4.6%. And this is despite the fact that the anime market in Japan itself has long been mature, making it much harder to grow at such a pace than abroad.
Animation studios also earned more than ever. Their revenue grew by 8.4%, reaching 505.5 billion yen ($3.2 billion), with overseas business bringing in 27.9%. At the same time, studios are increasingly striving to retain rights to their own works in order to manage their distribution independently and generate more revenue from their creativity.
“The idea that studios own the rights to their works and manage them to generate revenue is gaining popularity every year”
Japan is not planning to stop there. The country’s government has set a goal to increase Japanese content exports to 20 trillion yen by 2033, of which about 6 trillion ($38.1 billion) should come from anime. To achieve this, companies intend to release more localized versions, fight piracy more actively, and sell more merchandise based on their franchises abroad.