CULTURE / Film / 2025 IN REVIEW

2025 was the year Japan’s box office returned

In 2025, “Demon Slayer” and “Kokuho” broke box-office records, while films such as “Renoir,” A Pale View of the Hills” and “Two Strangers, Two Seasons” garnered acclaim on the international film festival circuit. The year’s biggest loss was the death of Tatsuya Nakadai, an highly regarded actor who had worked with nearly all of the top directors of Japanese cinema’s postwar golden age. | Lily Pisano

By Mark Schilling
Contributing writer

Dec 4, 2025

This year is poised to mark the Japanese box office’s best performance since pre-pandemic 2019, when the ¥14.2 billion (roughly $129 million) earned by the No. 1 film — Makoto Shinkai’s anime blockbuster “Weathering With You” — supercharged an all-time box-office record of ¥261.1 billion ($2.4 billion).

According to figures compiled by the Pixiin film and TV drama site (official numbers from the Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan will not be announced until January), the year’s biggest hit was “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle,” the latest feature iteration of the dark fantasy “Demon Slayer” franchise. Released in Japan in July by Aniplex and Toho, the film has so far grossed a total of ¥38.33 billion. This is second on Japan’s 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, the worldwide gross of “Infinity Castle” has surpassed the ¥100 billion ($644 million) mark, according to a Nov. 18 announcement by its Japanese distributors. This figure, a record for a Japanese film, was bested this year only by the Chinese animation smash “Ne Zha 2” with $2.2 billion (though the film made all but 3% of this total in mainland China).