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You can’t just grow an international sensation overnight. It takes time, especially for a property like Demon Slayer, to break out into the mainstream. Following the record-setting run Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle had at the box office in 2025, one Crunchyroll executive explained that the fandom’s growth wasn’t an accident. Instead, it was a result of the company spending nearly a decade planting the seeds for Demon Slayer to become the big anime hit that it is.

“We have spent the last eight years building this fandom,” Mitchel Berger, an executive vice-president and the head of theatrical at Crunchyroll, explained in a recent interview. “Come out of the pandemic, that fandom has just continued to grow.”

That probably isn’t a surprise to fans who have been watching the anime industry grow and grow over the past few years. With more shows reaching our shores every season and an influx of manga available both physically and digitally, Hollywood is taking notice of the intense appetite of anime fans. There are numerous live-action adaptations of popular shows in the pipeline. Meanwhile, Kodansha has set up its own studio in the US to help make these adaptations happen.

Clearly, Crunchyroll sees Demon Slayer as a key part of their line-up, which is why they’ve chosen to keep the latest film out of streaming for so long. The big question is how big Demon Slayer can get. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle has gone on to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, and we still have two more instalments before we get to the epic ending of the manga.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Aggretsuko vs Chainsaw Man: Two Wildly different anine with the same anti-capitalist message
• The Summer Anime season return of Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, & Dan Da Dan are forcing me to break my vow of watching less anime
• From Tomo-Chan to Oshi No Ko: How some of your favorite manga creators got their start in hentai
• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
• Studio Ghibli movies have never been as cozy as you think they are and that's what makes them magic