Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Infinity Castle – Part 1: Akaza Returns premiered in theaters all over Japan on July 18, 2025 to overwhelmingly positive reception. The movie grossed 7.31 billion yen (approx. 50 million USD) at the box office in the first four days of release, breaking opening weekend, opening day and single-day box office revenue records in Japan (Source: AV Watch). However, this success wouldn’t be possible without ufotable, its animation studio, pouring all their efforts and resources into the movie trilogy which they originally predicted would take more than 10 years to produce.
Compared to the previous movies which consisted of compiled and edited footage of the original anime series, the new Demon Slayer trilogy features all-new footage covering the manga’s Infinity Castle arc. As reported by Magmix, a special pamphlet handed out at the screenings of the first part of the trilogy revealed that production was extremely demanding in terms of time and manpower, pushing the studio to look for ways to cut production time. The Infinity Castle arc features a lot of dynamic character action, and it takes place in the eponymous gravity-bending pocket dimension, which posed a huge challenge to the animators.
With all this in mind, the studio estimated that just the 3DCG rendering for each movie would take about 3 years and 6 months – which is more than 10 years in total for all three movies. This, of course, was deemed an unrealistic schedule, which is why ufotable ultimately resorted to upgrading their work equipment. They reportedly made huge investments in new computers in order to shorten rendering time.
Additionally, due to the volume of the Demon Slayer movie trilogy and the manhours required, ufotable had all of their staff working on it – including animators who were originally assigned to the studio’s other projects. Since ufotable has also been announced as the animation studio for the most the Genshin Impact, Witch on the Holy Night and Touken Ranbu anime adaptations, Japanese X users are speculating that the focus on the Demon Slayer trilogy might be one of the reasons why it has been so long since we’ve heard anything about their other projects. The Genshin Impact anime was announced in 2022, with no updates for the past 3 years, while the most recent teaser for Witch on the Holy Night was released almost two years ago. It will most likely take a bit more time to see any further development for ufotable’s other works, as presumably most of the animation staff are busy with Demon Slayer.
With two more movies in the Infinity Castle trilogy and the whole Sunrise Countdown arc to be animated, it seems like the animation staff at ufotable still have a lot of work on their hands. However, with all the new equipment and a significant boost in workforce, the production of the final arcs of the Demon Slayer story might not take as long as we expect.
