Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that the corporate is getting ready a significant Oscar marketing campaign for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Film: Infinity Fort.
Throughout the interview, Purini was requested if Crunchyroll deliberate to push the movie for greatest animated function and different classes on the Academy Awards, and he confirmed that the group absolutely intends to again it.
“We predict the film is unimaginable — the animation, the story, the standard on all fronts,” Purini stated. “So sure, the followers completely deserve for the film to be thought of for awards. We’ll do our half to verify it will get the correct degree of help.”
The technique comes on the heels of Infinity Fort turning into the highest-grossing anime movie of all time worldwide, incomes over US$555 million so far. The milestone additionally makes it the top-earning Japanese movie in historical past and the ninth highest-grossing movie of 2025 general, forward of Marvel’s Unbelievable 4: First Steps (US$519.8 million).
In North America, Infinity Fort grossed US$104.7 million, setting a brand new regional file for anime releases and surpassing Pokémon: The First Film, which held the benchmark for greater than twenty years with US$85.74 million.
Purini famous that the film’s field workplace efficiency additionally debunks long-standing myths about anime fandom.
“I’ve been saying for 3 or 4 years now that anime fandom is not area of interest — it’s mainstream and gigantic. What this film did was present that to the world in a means the place there’s a variety of historic context to match in opposition to. At Crunchyroll, we’ve had knowledge and analysis displaying how huge and broad anime has change into, and we may present it within the context of different exhibits on our platform. However Infinity Fort’s success is the right strategy to exhibit this to the broader leisure world, as a result of it’s occurring on the field workplace, the place there are 100 years’ price of benchmarks. It’s now plain how huge anime has change into,” he acknowledged.
He additionally highlighted how the viewers has been extra various than many anticipated, pushing again in opposition to long-standing myths.
“Many individuals have at all times stated, ‘Oh, it is a Japanese medium, so it should be closely listed towards an Asian viewers.’ We’ve identified for some time that this isn’t the case. It’s a really various viewers. It overindexes throughout all completely different ethnicities. Whether or not it’s Hispanic, African American or South Asian, it overindexes. Once more, this has been in our knowledge for a very long time, however this field workplace success has been the right alternative for different events to see it firsthand, through exit polling and extra conventional metrics.“
In line with the newest ticket knowledge, the film offered 8.91 million tickets in the US and Canada, whereas in Japan, it moved over 23.7 million tickets after 67 days. Worldwide, complete ticket gross sales have reached 67 million for roughly 82.3 billion yen.
Supply: The Hollywood Reporter
