If the question of whether anime is mainstream was still on anyone’s lips, 2025 emphatically etched the medium in stone as an emphatic hell yes. Still, despite the banner year anime has had in theaters, it’s also been a year at an impasse about whether we’ll see it in its brilliant final form or only get glorified previews and compilation events masquerading as cinematic experiences moving forward.
Just to get them out of the way, because we’ve thoroughly glazed them in the past and their accolades bear repeating, anime films in 2025 were defined by the meteoric success of ufotable’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Mappa’s Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc. As they should be. The former, arguably the repopularized inception point of anime as a theatrical experience, exceeded already high expectations among its fandom with the studio’s crisp animation, a likeable ensemble, and blisteringly fast action, which added to the spectacle of being the first of a film trilogy to conclude the series, a hat on top of a hat of hype.
But most importantly, what Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle had to showcase was new and felt like a movie (with the conceit of the first leg of a film trilogy). Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc had the same high quality, yet somehow more so, in that it encompassed a complete arc of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s series as a cinematic experience that’ll occupy real estate in the frontal lobe of anime fans for years to come.
Still, despite these two big marquee films of 2025, fans were also graced with the gift of theatrical releases of movies that deserve as much shine for being a cinematic experience, mostly thanks to the effort of GKids and its initiative to make anime films more than just rereleases of retro greats like Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke and Studio Deen’s Angel’s Egg remastered in 4K. Those films include the likes of Science Saru’s synesthesia-fueled music anime The Colors Within, Rock’n Roll Mountain‘s film adaptation of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, and creator Uoto’s emotional track-and-field epic, 100 Meters.
One recently established format of anime in cinemas that’s quickly become a bit of an annoying hanger-on is theatrical preview events. Whether they be compilations of past seasons of shows like Jujutsu Kaisen or episodes stitched together as a three-episode test sampling of newer shows like Witch Watch, these events have started to leave a lot to be desired as theatrical experiences.
On paper, they were interesting. Basically, they were for the FOMO-averse who wanted to check out assuredly hot anime like Dan Da Dan before spoilers hit their timeline, as well as a way of being a part of those who beat the artificial scarcity of watching Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX weeks before they hit streaming platforms. They had some growing pains at the start, adding documentary content from creators positioned before the episodes themselves, scooping whatever surprises lay in wait. But this phenomenon began to lose its luster in part because of the forthcoming cinematic explosion of Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man and the diminishing returns of this format.
The first pang of annoyance with this anime film format was inevitable: having to wait for new episodes, weeks into shows that had finally aired. It’s basically like having the blowback from a gun you shot smacking you in the face. Sure, it was your fault for buying into the preview ahead, but strong-arming your disposable income for a steeply priced movie ticket to basically watch three (maybe four) episodes of an anime to feel like the “They don’t know” meme whenever patient anime fans have water cooler talk online about said episodes routinely became a bitter pill to swallow.
Aside from seeing the opening themes of those shows, moviegoers were basically resigned to not really feeling part of the whole weekly experience because they ponied up the cash to be cursed with knowing where things were going.
And while Jujutsu Kaisen fans know no shame regarding spoiler culture etiquette, nobody wants to be that guy who accidentally ruins the fun for folks because they basically did what video games have been admonished for with paid service subscriptions: accessing a game days earlier than everyone else. Speaking of Jujutsu Kaisen, its hybrid compilation film-preview event for its upcoming season, Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution, was among the worst of both worlds in this format.
As a compilation film, it didn’t do a good job of showcasing the season’s best moments. Not to be mean, but TikTok content creators do a better job of not cutting around the emotional thrust of these sorcery-fighting moments. The film’s handling of it only highlighted the weaker points of the series’ fair-weather story when condensed rather than spread out in an episodic format. And because the series is such a dense information dump of concepts and power sets, the actual new content in it wasn’t worth the squeeze, with its inevitable cliffhanger ending making even its action, the series’ strong point, feel a bit pyrrhic on the big screen, as the whole thing was bogged down by jerry-rigging itself into an arc redolent of an actual movie.
To be fair to JJK, it was a far cry from the worst of these formatted anime movies (in name only) theatrical experiences. That’d probably be Shaft’s Virgin Punk Clockwork Girl, a mostly documentary film and a preview event. While pretty, it wasn’t giving FOMO but ROMO (relief of missing out), given how expensive movies are and how little it lived up to the price of admission.
But in the wake of films like Demon Slayer and Chainsaw Man proving that anime is best experienced as a complete cinematic experience rather than a glorified trailer for streaming platforms, the anime industry feels like it’s on the razor’s edge in how it’ll release its projects moving forward. Either it can take its mainstream status as a launching pad to treat its movies as full-arc experiences, or it can continue to position itself as a neat novelty act. Hopefully, the global industry will decide to make its future theatrical experiences more like Reze Arc and less like glorified preview events from now on.
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Isaiah Colbert
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