Demon Slayer’s Infinity Castle Breaks Pokémon’s 25-Year Record And Proves Anime Fans Aren’t Who You Think They Are

Summary

• Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle smashes records, earning $37M in Japan and $70M in North America, dethroning Pokémon’s 1998 milestone.
• Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini says the film proves anime fandom is no longer niche, but mainstream and diverse.
• Exit polls show wide appeal, Gen Z, parents, and older fans, challenging myths that anime is only for kids or Asian audiences.

When Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle opened in Japanese theaters on July 18, it quickly rewrote box office history.

The film, based on Koyoharu Gotouge’s best-selling manga, earned ¥1.64 billion (about $11.1 million) on its first day and ¥5.52 billion (about $37.4 million) in its opening weekend, setting new records in both categories.

It also became the second-highest-grossing film of 2025 in Japan after just three days in release.

The film’s momentum carried overseas. With its North American debut on Sept. 12, Infinity Castle pulled in $70 million on opening day, the largest September debut for an animated feature in the region and the best-ever launch for an anime film.

That figure eclipsed the $31 million opening weekend of 1998’s Pokémon: The First Movie, which had long stood as the genre’s North American benchmark.

The success has drawn particular attention from Rahul Purini, president of Crunchyroll, which distributed the movie internationally.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Purini suggested the numbers confirm what many inside the industry have already observed: that anime has moved far beyond niche status.

“I’ve been saying for three or four years now that anime fandom is no longer niche, it’s mainstream and gigantic,” Purini said. “This movie showed that in a way that can’t be disputed, because box office results can be measured against more than a century of benchmarks.”

Purini argued that Infinity Castle also helps dismantle stereotypes about anime audiences. For decades, the assumption was that anime primarily appealed to Japanese or Asian viewers.

The film’s results, he said, tell a different story.

“Many people have always said, ‘Oh, this is a Japanese medium, so it must be heavily indexed toward an Asian audience,’” he noted. “We’ve known that isn’t true. Anime has always been diverse. It overindexes across different ethnicities, Hispanic, African American, South Asian. The data has been there for a while, but now everyone else is seeing it too.”

The exit polling for Infinity Castle reflected that diversity, reinforcing research Crunchyroll has shared internally for years.

Generational shifts are also central to anime’s current expansion. Analysts often frame the medium’s popularity as a Gen Z and Gen Alpha phenomenon, and Purini did not dispute that characterization.

“It’s absolutely true,” he said. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha are a huge part of this fandom.”

But he added that the audience is broader than that.

“We saw parents coming with their kids, and we saw fans in their 30s, 40s, and 50s,” he explained. “It is weighted toward younger demographics, but it’s not limited to them.”

Anime’s rise has been steadily documented in streaming numbers, merchandise sales, and convention attendance.

But Infinity Castle’s global box office has given those trends a new visibility within the broader film industry, where comparisons to Hollywood blockbusters carry more weight than subscriber statistics.

For viewers in the United States and Canada, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle remains in theaters.

How long it stays there may depend on the same factor that has shaped much of its success: an audience far larger and more varied than industry myths once allowed.

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