‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Vaults MAPPA to Anime Studio Lead as Streaming Shifts From Licensing to Ownership, Media Partners Asia Report Finds

Anime drew a larger monthly audience than any other genre on Asian streaming platforms between July 2025 and August 2026, and viewing on Netflix grew nine times faster than the service overall, according to a new report from Media Partners Asia (MPA).

“The Anime Economy” report draws on ampd audience panels MPA runs across eight Asian markets, on how MPA classifies Netflix’s engagement figures and public filings, and on additional research and interviews MPA conducted. Between 31% and 47% of premium-VOD users across those markets watched anime in any given month during the period, compared with 26% to 34% for the average of the other seven genres tracked. In Japan, the figures ran higher still, from 45% to 59% against 24% to 36%. Anime accounted for 15.6% of tracked premium-VOD hours in the second half of 2025 and 14.0% in the first half of 2026, with the Japan figure at 28%.

“Jujutsu Kaisen” ranked as the top anime title in seven of the eight markets tracked in the first half of 2026, MPA found, propelling MAPPA’s share of regional anime hours from 6.1% in the second half of 2025 to 17.3% in the first half of 2026. That put MAPPA just ahead of TMS Entertainment at 16.6%, with Toei Animation at 13% and titles mastered by Aniplex at 12%.

Netflix carried roughly half of the region’s anime viewing across the tracking period, holding 51% of anime hours in the second half of 2025 and 50% in the first half of 2026. Japan, the world’s largest anime market, has become a two-way contest between the two biggest global platforms: Prime Video held a 43% share of anime hours there in the second half of 2025, before Netflix pulled even with 42% each in the first half of 2026.

MPA’s classification of Netflix’s “What We Watched” disclosures shows the platform’s Japanese anime viewing climbing from 3.33 billion hours in the first half of 2023 to 4.64 billion hours in the first half of 2026, a 39% jump against 4.5% growth in Netflix’s total viewing over the same period. Anime rose from 3.6% to 4.75% of all Netflix hours in that window. Four-fifths of that viewing remains licensed library content, though MPA points to Netflix’s January 2026 partnership with MAPPA as a marker of the shift toward owned franchises.

YouTube has become both a marketing channel and a production base for anime: MPA counts 70 million people watching anime-related content there monthly in Japan alone, totaling 2.8 billion hours. Official channels including Aniplex, with 5.1 million monthly viewers, and Toho animation, with 4.8 million, now function as media businesses in their own right, while YouTube-native outfits like Plott are turning out franchises for a fraction of what a traditional TV production would cost.

MPA counted 21 anime transactions and alliances since 2021, 11 of them struck in 2025 and 2026. Sony took part in seven of those deals, building what MPA calls the industry’s only end-to-end anime operation. Crunchyroll, with 21 million paying subscribers, now sits alongside Sony Pictures, Sony Music and Aniplex within Sony’s portfolio, with the group also holding equity positions in both Kadokawa and Bandai Namco. Toei Animation, Toho, Bandai Namco and other broadcasters have separately bought up studios, distributors and pipelines to build their own capacity.

MPA projects worldwide anime spending will rise by some 10% annually through 2030, driven mainly by Asia outside Japan and North America, with the gains concentrated among a limited group of franchise-owning companies, studios and platforms. The firm’s base case for the next 24 months is a hybrid financing model in which platforms put up the money for production while studios keep hold of the rights.

“Anime’s scale is established; the question is where the next growth comes from and who captures it,” said Vivek Couto, CEO and executive director of Media Partners Asia. “The catalysts are streaming pushing deeper into new markets globally, theatrical events on the scale of ‘Infinity Castle’ [“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle”] becoming repeatable, and games and merchandise carrying franchises well beyond the screen. The direction is toward ownership: platforms financing production directly, Japanese IP groups buying studios, and the two learning to work together.”

“The constraint is capacity, not demand or capital,” he added. “The studios making the biggest hits are often the least able to invest, and the industry still leans on a handful of franchises. The companies that solve for capacity, and bring the animators with them, will be best placed for the next phase of growth.”