Anime blockbuster Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle and live-action sensation Kokuho drove the Japanese box office to new heights in 2025. Meanwhile, Japanese films were winning prizes and kudos on the festival circuit, heralding the rise of a new generation of top-flight filmmakers.
The Japanese box office had a record-breaking year in 2025, with revenues growing 32.6% year-on-year to ¥274.45 billion (US$1.8 billion), according to figures compiled by the industry organisation Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan, or Eiren. Attendance also rose, by 30.7%, to 188.7 million, the second highest figure of the millennium
This compares with the former high of ¥261.18 billion set in 2019, when Shinkai Makoto’s hit anime Weathering with You supercharged the box office with its ¥14.2 billion gross. This record was determined by Eiren’s use of gross to measure box office success since 2000. Prior to that organization had made distributor revenues its yardstick.
Blockbuster anime dominated the top of the 2025 box office chart, headed by Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle, with earnings of ¥39.14 billion. The latest feature iteration of the dark fantasy Demon Slayer franchise, the film was released in Japan in July by Aniplex and Toho. Its total is second on the Japan all-time box office list, with the top spot held by the first Demon Slayer film, which finished its domestic run with ¥40.75 billion in 2020.
Meanwhile, Infinity Castle’s worldwide gross was US$730 million, bested this year only by the Chinese animation smash Ne Zha 2 with US$2.2 billion (though the film made all but 3% of this total in mainland China.)
First among live-action films, and second overall, was Kokuho, a film set in the postwar Kabuki world that raked in ¥19.55 billion. Directed by Lee Sang-il and based on Yoshida Shuichi’s two-part novel, the film traces the lives of two kabuki onnagata (players of female roles) who become friends and rivals as teenagers in postwar Osaka, and take diverging paths in the coming decades. One, a gangster’s son played as an adult by Yoshizawa Ryo, becomes the title kokuho, or national treasure, an honour awarded by the Japanese government to the master of a traditional art or craft.
Released in June of last year and supported by strong word of mouth, the film quickly rose to the number one box-office slot and stayed there for weeks. By Nov. 24, Kokuho had racked up ¥17.37 billion in earnings, beating the all-time record for a live-action Japanese film set by the 2003 smash Bayside Shakedown 2. The film now stands 11th in the all-time domestic rankings for both Japanese and foreign films.
Kokuho defied industry conventional wisdom in both its three-hour running time, considered too long for the fly-like attention spans of contemporary audiences, and its subject matter, with the kabuki world being thought of as too niche for a mainstream entertainment. Referring to these points in an article for the President Online site, veteran Toho producer Ichikawa Minami confessed that his company – Japan’s largest film producer, distributor and exhibitor – judged Kokuho a “high business risk” and decided to distribute it rather than fully finance it.
But Lee’s nimble direction, the lavish production values and riveting performances by the two leads, who trained intensively in kabuki for months before the start of shooting, helped make Kokuho a must-see event, even for film fans whose only exposure to kabuki had been on a long-ago school trip.
Ranking third at the box office for 2025 was Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback, the 28th entry in the Detective Conan animated mystery feature series. Fourth was Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, an anime based on a manga series about a teenaged boy able to transform parts of his body into chainsaws that he uses to battle devils threatening humanity. Rounding out the top five was the live-action comic fantasy Cells at Work!, which took in ¥6.36bn. Starring Nakano Mei as a hard-working red blood cell and Satoh Takeru as a fearless white blood cell who protects her, the film had its Italian premiere at last year’s FEFF.
The top distributor, with revenues of ¥160.5 billion, was Toho, which released or co-released the top four films, as well as other box-office winners. The company, which launched the Godzilla series into the world seven decades ago, accounted for nearly half of industry revenues.
Foreign films, with an earnings uptick of 30.7%, showed signs of recovery from the slump they entered during the pandemic and the Hollywood writers and actors’ strikes. Even so, in 2025 domestic films grabbed a 75.6% of market share and foreign films settled for 24.4%. The days when Hollywood dominated the Japanese market year after year, decade after decade, faded farther in the distance.
The top non-Japanese film on the 2025 box office chart, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning in ninth place, grossed ¥5.8 billion. By comparison, in 2019 six foreign films out-earned it, led by Frozen 2 with ¥14.2 billion.
A total of 38 Japanese and 12 foreign films earned ¥1bn or better – the traditional marker for a box office hit.
Japanese films were well represented at major festivals in 2025, particularly the Cannes Film Festival, where Hayakawa Chie’s second feature Renoir screened in the Competition section. Based on the director’s own childhood experiences, the film focuses on an independent, imaginative 11-year-old girl (talented newcomer Suzuki Yui) whose father is dying of cancer. Vividly impressionistic and alive to the moment, Renoir subverts local medical melodrama conventions to luminous and finally exhilarating effect.
Also screening at Cannes, in the Un Certain Regard section, was Ishikawa Kei’s A Pale View of the Hills, a drama based on the eponymous first novel by Nobel-Prize-winner Ishiguro Kazuo.
Hirose Suzu and Nikaido Fumi star as women of differing temperaments and circumstances – Hirose’s excruciatingly polite young housewife and Nikaido’s feisty single mom – who become friends in postwar Nagasaki, bonding over their shared history as atomic bombing survivors. Dreamlike and multifaceted, the film defies pat analysis, while giving a chilling new meaning to the term “magical realism.”
The winner of the most prestigious festival award, however, was Miyake Sho’s Two Strangers, Two Seasons. Based on two comics by cult favorite Tsuge Yoshiharu, this stunningly photographed, ingeniously plotted and wistfully observant film centers on a scriptwriter (Shim Eun-kyung) who goes on a journey of creative renewal. Premiering at the 78th Locarno Film Festival, Two Strangers, Two Seasons was awarded the Golden Leopard, the first Japanese film to win the festival’s highest honour since Kobayashi Masahiro’s The Rebirth in 2007.
The year’s biggest loss was the death, at age 92, of Nakadai Tatsuya, an actor who had worked with nearly all of the directors of Japanese cinema’s postwar Golden Age. Nakadai was best-known abroad, however, for his collaborations with Kurosawa Akira, playing everything from a pistol-waving gangster in Yojimbo (1961) to a mad old lord modeled on Shakespeare’s King Lear in Ran (1985).
A lifelong student of his craft, who started an acting school with his actress wife in 1975, Nakadai had a distinctive, commanding presence while taking on a wide variety of roles, though he became best known internationally for his weightier films, including Kobayashi Masaki’s war drama trilogy The Human Condition (1959-61) and samurai drama Harakiri (1962). Both were hailed as genre-defining masterpieces.
Nakadai had a late-career revival with another Kobayashi – Masahiro – confronting the indignities and insults of advancing age in Haru’s Journey (2010), Japan’s Tragedy (2012) and Lear on the Shore (2017).
Box-office records may fall, but Nakadai is now and forever like the era he so indelibly represented – a glorious and irreplaceable one-off.
Mark Schilling