Crunchyroll CEO Rahul Purini revealed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that the company is preparing a major Oscar campaign for Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle.
During the interview, Purini was asked if Crunchyroll planned to push the film for best animated feature and other categories at the Academy Awards, and he confirmed that the team fully intends to back it.
“We think the movie is incredible — the animation, the story, the quality on all fronts,” Purini said. “So yes, the fans absolutely deserve for the movie to be considered for awards. We’ll do our part to make sure it gets the right level of support.”
The strategy comes on the heels of Infinity Castle becoming the highest-grossing anime film of all time worldwide, earning over US$555 million to date. The milestone also makes it the top-earning Japanese film in history and the ninth highest-grossing film of 2025 overall, ahead of Marvel’s Fantastic Four: First Steps (US$519.8 million).
Purini noted that the movie’s box office performance also debunks long-standing myths about anime fandom.
“I’ve been saying for three or four years now that anime fandom is no longer niche — it’s mainstream and gigantic. What this movie did was show that to the world in a way where there’s a lot of historical context to compare against. At Crunchyroll, we’ve had data and research showing how big and broad anime has become, and we could show it in the context of other shows on our platform. But Infinity Castle’s success is the perfect way to demonstrate this to the broader entertainment world, because it’s happening at the box office, where there are 100 years’ worth of benchmarks. It’s now undeniable how big anime has become,” he stated.
He also highlighted how the audience has been more diverse than many expected, pushing back against long-standing myths.
“Many people have always said, ‘Oh, this is a Japanese medium, so it must be heavily indexed toward an Asian audience.’ We’ve known for a while that this isn’t the case. It’s a very diverse audience. It overindexes across all different ethnicities. Whether it’s Hispanic, African American or South Asian, it overindexes. Again, this has been in our data for a long time, but this box office success has been the perfect opportunity for other parties to see it firsthand, via exit polling and more traditional metrics.“
According to the latest ticket data, the movie sold 8.91 million tickets in the United States and Canada, while in Japan, it moved over 23.7 million tickets after 67 days. Worldwide, total ticket sales have reached 67 million for approximately 82.3 billion yen.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
