A few days ago, the Japan Video Software Association released the statistics for purchases of home video software in Japan, namely DVDs and Blu-rays, from January 2021 until July 2021. Although sales of physical video are consistently decreasing due to increased consumer usage of streaming services, such as Netflix and Crunchyroll, physical copies of the critically acclaimed anime movie – Demon Slayer: Mugen Train – helped to dramatically boost sales.
Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, which takes places directly at the end of the first series, was released in Japan in October 16, 2020 and continued to be released worldwide until around July 2021. It quickly became the highest-grossing movie of 2020, bringing in a whooping $500 million in the box office. It also became the highest-grossing anime, as well as the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.
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The box office sales quickly transitioned into physical media sales with the movie selling over 1 million copies. Total sales of “Japanese animation”, specially categorized as being for the general public, and "Japanese for children", referred to as animation, brought in about 26 billion yen, which was about 38% of the total. This caused anime to become the top share by genre, beating out music. With the much anticipated season two of Demon Slayer set to be released sometime in 2021, we can expect the continued increase of physical sales of anime media to continue to climb as high as Tanjiro on Sagiri Mountain.
In other Demon Slayer news, Demon Slayer: The Hinokami Chronicles – the game being released in October about the anime’s first season – wil being released in October and a recent tweet by popular leaker PS360HD2 revealed that playable demons – members of the Twelve Kizuki, Rui and Akaza – will be available as a free update DLC.
The dubbed and subbed versions of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train are currently available for viewing on Funimation’s streaming service.
Source: Crunchyroll
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