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In a report by the Financial Times, Toho manager Keiji Ota spoke that in the future one would like to avert the exclusive anime licensing and instead want to offer your titles on several platforms at the same time.
No anime monopolies
After a lot of consideration, one came to the conclusion that an anime does not really spread if it is monopolized by a single streaming service and only seen by its subscribers.
For this reason, according to Keiji Ota, Managing Executive Officer at Toho, one would like to fundamentally revise the previous licensing process:
»So far, our strategy was to only sell the master license – you get a large sum immediately and then have no further obligations. We didn’t know how much anime and merchandise in which countries and regions was actually sold. That is why we will rely on a strategy in the future in which our international team deliberately concludes license contracts for each individual region. «
The wish of Toho, according to a better understanding of this data from overseas, results from the lack of transparency in the license sales, which would be used to use the internal distribution of the income.
A Bloomberg report from 2024 saw Crunchyroll as one of the triggers for increasing dissatisfaction. This also spoke of tensions between Toho and Crunchyroll, which should have been created by the fact that the VoD service had decided against an extensive doctorate in the anime series due to the lack of exclusive rights to “Dan da Dan”.
Own sales plans
Toho has already taken several steps in recent years to better monitor the distribution of his anime and merchandise products in overseas.
For example, the company bought the North American film rental Gkids, which has just announced the acquisition of the rights to the upcoming compilation film on “Jujutsu Kaisen”, which is scheduled to be released on July 16, 2025.
In addition, Toho himself took over the North American distribution of “My Hero Academia: You’re Next” after Crunchyroll brought the three previous films to the cinema. After all, the VoD service was allowed to show the strip in other regions.
In addition, in the Merchandise area of ​​the iizo store, in which goods are offered from the in-house anime productions, it was expanded.
In some cases, the exclusive sales of an anime title can help a work to be successful, but in other cases it can also be disadvantage, which is why the rights holders and studios will probably make significantly careful decisions in the future.
