Popverse's top stories

• DC Comics cancels Red Hood comic book series
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Better angels and online demons: A trip down the rabbit hole of Downton Abbey fandom

Despite being off the air for nearly a decade, anime fans still have a healthy appetite for all things Naruto. In fact, according to new figures, Naruto and Boruto have soared past the likes of One Piece, Demon Slayer, and even Pokémon to become the most-watched anime on Netflix in the second half of 2024. Fans clearly can’t get enough of the plucky ninja from the Hidden Leaf Village.

The analysis comes via Pascal J. Bonnet, a former executive director at Viz Media who has gone on to set up his own consulting firm for anime and manga publishers. He crunched the numbers in the What We Watched report and found that more hours of Naruto were watched on Netflix in the second half of 2024 than any other anime on the platform. 330 million hours of Naruto were streamed by Netflix subscribers, surpassing the 316 million hours of One Piece. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba was a distant third with 208 million hours streamed globally.

The full top ten figures are:

• Naruto – 330 million hours
• One Piece – 316 million hours
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – 208 million hours
• Pokémon – 170 million hours
• Black Clover – 138 million hours
• Hunter x Hunter – 138 million hours
• The Seven Deadly Sins – 128 million hours
• My Hero Academia – 127 million hours
• Dan Da Dan – 97 million hours
• Jujutsu Kaisen – 87 million hours

Obviously, Naruto’s figures are aided by the fact that there are a lot of episodes to watch – many of them filler, but still. The fact that it has overtaken One Piece for the last six months of 2024 is probably because a new batch of episodes of Naruto was added to Netflix in many markets, which spurred many fans to pick the series up again. 2025 is going to be an interesting year for these figures, as One Piece season 2 finally gets a release date and the first of the Demon Slayer Infinity Castle movies comes out.

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