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The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival wrapped this week, a few days after its content market TIFFCOM, with Japan’s government talking up a JPY20 trillion ($126.6 billion) content export target, and the anime industry
arriving with numbers to back it up.
The festival ran Oct. 26–Nov. 4, with TIFFCOM held Oct. 28–30 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center in Hamamatsucho. Across both, the talk kept returning to who owns Japanese IP, who pays to develop it and how far producers will travel to find partners. Here are the key takeaways.
Anime Hits a Record $28.2 Billion
The hardest number of the week came from the Association of Japanese Animations (AJA). Spending on Japanese anime worldwide reached a record JPY4.45 trillion ($28.2 billion) in 2025, up 15.8% on the year, according to preliminary figures presented at TIFFCOM by Hasegawa Masahiro, editor-in-chief of the AJA’s annual “Anime Industry Report.”
Much of the growth came from home. Local growth jumped to 14.1% from 4.6% in 2024, reaching JPY1.91 trillion ($12.1 billion). Overseas revenue rose 17.2% to JPY2.54 trillion ($16.1 billion), slower than the 26% of a year earlier, though overseas still accounts for 57.1% of the total.
Studio revenue also hit a record, rising 8.4% to JPY505.5 billion ($3.2 billion).
“The idea of studios holding the rights to their own works and managing them to generate revenue is growing year by year,” Hasegawa said.
The industry is also building its own institutions. The AJA named its new national prize the Nippon Anime Awards and set the first ceremony for Nov. 21, 2027, at SGC Hall Ariake in Tokyo. The name was revealed at Tokyo Anime Next, an event co-organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. A TIFFCOM symposium on Oct. 30 examined what the awards are for.
Japanese IP Continues to be the Market’s Currency
TIFFCOM spent three days selling Japanese stories to the world, and the Cannes Film Market signed up for more. On Oct. 29 the two markets said they would stage a second Japan IP Market in Cannes on May 14–15, 2027, following a first edition in May, when Japan was Country of Honor at the Cannes market.
Back in Tokyo, eight rights holders pitched titles in English at the Tokyo IP Market: Adaptation & Remake on the market’s first day. Shochiku offered its long-running “Otoko wa Tsurai yo” film series, Takara Tomy pitched its “Beyblade” toy franchise and Toei put forward the film “Inugamimura.”
The platforms are spending. Buddy Marini, head of Amazon MGM Studios Japan, said at a TIFFCOM session on the global potential of Japanese IP that the studio is doubling its investment to bring its content up to global standards. He shared the stage with “Kokuho” producer Matsuhashi Shinzo and “One Piece” executive producer Steven Maeda.
TIFFCOM CEO Shiina Yasushi wants Japanese companies to hold on to their IP and their overseas distribution, Hollywood style. “I believe anime is leading the way worldwide, with live-action following in its footsteps,” he told Variety ahead of the market. He plans to grow TIFFCOM well beyond its current size, venue included, by around 2030.
The buyers turned up. Registered visitors, the buyers, producers and investors who do the deals, rose 13% to 1,425, according to TIFFCOM’s preliminary figures. Those from overseas rose 9% to 814, with the North American contingent growing by a third and the European one by nearly 70%, while visitors from Japan grew 20%. Overall participation slipped to 4,405 from 4,610, mainly because fewer people came from Greater China, but the market drew participants from 51 countries and regions, up from 46. It had 317 exhibitors, against 322 last year, and its conferences and events logged around 3,000 attendances.
Big Government Targets, Struggling Filmmakers
The government set its sights high at the opening ceremony, where Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Akazawa Ryosei and Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, appearing by video, restated the goal of JPY20 trillion in overseas content sales by 2033. A Cabinet Office task force, which first met on Oct. 22, is working toward a single body to bring the government’s scattered content support under one roof.
International producers want the existing tools fixed first. At the Motion Picture Association’s annual seminar, “Tokyo Vice” producer Alex Boden said the IP360 incentive’s minimum spend, now JPY800 million ($5.1 million), shuts out independent films and co-productions, since most Japanese films cost between $1.5 million and $3 million.
“So how does a producer know that they can count on the Japan incentive in advance? That’s the question, and we need a solution,” Boden said.
Netflix production policy director Deb Richards said a lower incentive would be fine as long as it was certain and its criteria were clear. “And that’s one of the things that for the Japan incentive, the criteria is not clear,” she said.
The view from the director’s chair was bleaker. O Mipo shared this year’s Kurosawa Akira Award with Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and spoke to Variety before the ceremony.
“I honestly don’t think there are any directors in Japan right now who are making a living solely from directing movies. They have to do other things – like streaming, TV dramas, commercials, and all sorts of other work – because you really can’t survive just from movies,” O said.
She counts herself among them. Her commercial work has dried up because a film “takes up a huger chunk of your time,” she said, and “things have gotten a bit bleak since I’m relying solely on movies.” In Japan, she added, “the reality is that you don’t get a single yen at the planning stage.”
Festival programming director Ichiyama Shozo said Japan has a surprisingly large number of talented filmmakers. “While support for Japanese cinema has increased in various forms over the past few years, support for low-budget films is still insufficient,” he told Variety.
The festival is trying to help. This year it launched TIFF Work-in-Progress for Japanese films that need money to finish production, and turned its Nippon Cinema Now section into a competition with two new awards. Tanaka Miki’s debut “Silver Express” won its best film prize.
Actor Isomura Hayato, the “Alice in Borderland” star who headed the jury for the festival’s Ethical Film Award, said Japan needs more government funding and support for entertainment and film, and pointed to South Korea, where a change of government shifted the climate for the industry.
Co-Production Partners From Well Outside Asia
The search for partners stretched well beyond the region. One producer said the subject came up a lot across TIFFCOM’s panels.
“I can tell that they’re looking for co-producers and co-producers who are technically outside of Japan or the Asian market,” he said. Panelists, he added, raised co-productions with Mongolia and the U.K. and, he believed, were looking for funding partners in South America. “That was like the main repetitive thing: looking for co-producers to help them out.”
Andrew Partridge, chief content officer at Toho Europe, said it was remarkable how similar the trends stay from year to year.
“Right now the impact of streaming investment & television commission changes worldwide remain constant here. That’s given way to the point that if traditional routes won’t fund the full whack – what will cover the tab overall? You’re seeing a real movement to emerging markets to help with that such as Africa and Middle East for example which gives rise for exciting new content mixes too,” Partridge said.
For Ervin Han, CEO and co-founder of Singapore’s Robot Playground Media, the market showed “a continued and growing interest in coproductions at both regional and international levels – understanding the dynamics, intricacies and best practices esp amongst Asian players.”
Han has seen it work. He told a TIFFCOM anime co-production panel that a meeting at the market in 2023 brought Italian co-producers to “The Violinist,” which went on to win the top prize at France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival this year.
Even the competition jury was talking about it. Juror Alex Lo, a New York- and Tokyo-based producer whose credits include Jim Jarmusch’s Venice Golden Lion winner “Father Mother Sister Brother,” said producers in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere “are increasingly seeking co-production opportunities,” largely because local government support is lacking.
The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market put that into practice. Its seventh edition selected 24 projects and partnered for the first time with Frontières, the genre co-production market of Canada’s Fantasia International Film Festival. Taiwan’s “Uncle,” from director Yen Hao-hsuan, won both the Tokyo Project Award and the Asian Gen-Z Award. Japan-Canada genre co-production “Wild Zero Overdrive,” from director Takeuchi Tetsuro, took the White Light Post-Production Award, and Brazilian director Matias Mariani’s “Nature Boy” won the Mellow Tunes Sound Design Award. Next year, the market will open up to a wider range of genres.
Chang Chen-yu, founder of Taiwan-Japan co-production fund Daily Capital, which launched at TIFFCOM on Oct. 28, said “buyers and investors from Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia had a much stronger presence at TIFFCOM.”
“Cross-border co-production between Northeast and Southeast Asia has become central to mainstream business discussions,” he said.
Daily Capital aims to raise NT$100 million (about $3.1 million) and back at least five film, TV and animation projects over its first two years. K2 Pictures and Remow are its Japanese co-development partners, and its first investment is the 1930s-set period romance series “Love Ends in Bloom.” Vietnam, meanwhile, returned with its national film pavilion for a second year.
The All-Rights Buyout Fades
The money is changing shape as well as source. Chang said major international streaming platforms have become more cautious with their acquisition budgets, and that the market is no longer dominated entirely by all-rights buyouts. At TIFFCOM, distributors and independent producers were regaining negotiating power, with companies favoring minimum guarantees while keeping theatrical, TV and streaming rights separate in each territory, which stretches out revenue and adds value to IP extensions.
“This year, proposals for cross-border distribution and early-stage co-production financing have increased significantly. Asian buyers and platforms – including Japanese broadcasters, regional streaming services and international distributors – are more willing to get involved early in development to spread the risk beyond a single market,” Chang said.
Japan’s production committee system is showing more flexibility toward international collaboration, welcoming cross-border investment and new distribution models, he added.
A TIFFCOM panel on film funds showed what that can look like. K2 Pictures’ K2P Film Fund I closed in February at about JPY5 billion ($32 million) as a blind pool, with investors committing before films are chosen, and aims to back around 50 films over seven years. Five of its films have reached theaters this year. MUFG Bank is also running a feasibility study for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on whether completion guarantees, which help U.S. producers secure bank loans, can work in Japan. K2 Pictures CEO Kii Muneyuki said it is hard to rely on overseas box office.
The broadcasters are moving in the same direction. TBS used its TIFFCOM session to set out its partnership with Hollywood’s Legendary Entertainment and the global rollout of “Sasuke,” while Nippon TV laid out its co-production frameworks, including the drama “Merry Berry Love” with South Korea’s CJ ENM.
AI Offers ‘Data, Not a Solution’
The AI keynote went to AGBO, the studio founded by the Russo brothers. Partner Chris Brearton and chief scientific officer Dominic Hughes set out where the technology helps and where it falls short.
Hughes said AI can judge whether a play found in an attic might be Shakespeare’s, but asked to write one of its own, “you’d have the sense that it was written by a 12-year-old.”
“If you’re struggling a little bit with a character in the third act, it can provide data,” Brearton said. “Not a solution, but data.”
The pair also talked about anime and manga, and about the chance for Japanese stories to find audiences around the world.
The Oscars Come Calling
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sent its top brass. CEO Bill Kramer, president Lynette Howell Taylor, chief membership officer Meredith Shea and Academy Museum director and president Amy Homma came to Tokyo to set out the Oscars’ global plans, and Kramer received the festival’s Global Cinema Leadership Special Award.
The share of Academy members living outside the U.S. has grown from around 5% to 25% in a decade, Kramer said. From 2029, the ceremony will stream free on YouTube to 2.5 billion people in more than 30 languages.
Asked whether Tokyo could join the six festivals whose top prizes now qualify films for the international feature race, Kramer said: “We’re looking to expand the number of festivals that help films qualify for the International Feature Film category. That’s a process that we’re undertaking this year, so stay tuned for more information on that.”
Cate Blanchett brought the Displacement Film Fund, which she co-founded, to give its first five short films their Japan premiere. Blanchett called the Academy’s move to make exiled filmmakers eligible for the Oscars “very profound.” Two of the fund’s directors, Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat, said they had little interest in a separate category for exiles.
“I really do not like to be labeled, and even this label is displaced,” Sadat said.
Tokyo Makes the A-List and Rethinks Its Standing
The festival came into this edition with a new official label. In March, FIAPF, the international federation of film producers’ associations, replaced its four-category accreditation system with a single list and designated 17 festivals as A-list, a term the industry had long used informally. Tokyo is on it, alongside Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, Busan, Shanghai and Cairo.
Jury president Rolf de Heer, asked at the jury press conference whether the label mattered, said most people who attend festivals had always considered Tokyo one of them. “Tokyo was effectively an A festival. And so in that sense, I don’t think it makes a lot of difference,” he said.
The festival itself is taking stock. Festival director Hisamatsu Takeo said Tokyo will review this edition and reassess its place in Asia and globally before its 40th anniversary next year.
“I believe the direction we establish through that process will also help define TIFF’s course for the next decade, leading up to its 50th edition,” Hisamatsu told Variety.
“We are somehow in a competitive relationship with the Busan IFF, we’re close geographically and our dates are close too,” he said.
The 39th edition grew to 204 films from 184 last year and leaned on big titles. Zeze Takahisa’s “Sukiyaki” opened the festival, Yamazaki Takashi’s “Godzilla Minus Zero,” the first Japanese film certified as Filmed for Imax, was the centerpiece ahead of its Nov. 3 release in Japan, and Yeon Sang-ho’s “Colony” closed it. De Heer’s jury gave the Tokyo Grand Prix to Milcho Manchevski’s “Sister Brother Manhole Cover,” and Narita Ryo won best actor for “Two Cigarettes, Three Nights.”
Stars Kamiki Ryunosuke and Hamabe Minami arrived at the festival’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” event two days after flying back from the film’s Los Angeles premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre, where it drew a standing ovation.
“Feeling that raw enthusiasm firsthand made me realize all over again just how deeply Godzilla is loved around the world,” Kamiki said.
Japan was just as keen. Post its festival premiere, “Minus Zero” took JPY910 million ($5.8 million) from more than 590,000 admissions on its Nov. 3 opening day, the biggest opening day for any live-action film in Japan. That is about double the first-day figure for its predecessor, “Godzilla Minus One,” which went on to gross more than JPY7.65 billion ($50 million) at the local box office and became the first Asian production to win the visual effects Oscar.
Taiwanese director Lee Yun-chan, who recently won best director at the Busan International Film Festival, said she was struck by the rigor of the festival.
“At several festival screenings, I noticed that male audience members were also very eager to ask questions, and the audience skewed older,” Lee told Variety. One fan brought her a DVD of “The Shoe Fairy,” her film from 21 years ago, to sign.
