Japanese entertainment company Toho revealed its expansion strategy for the anime business as part of its financial results presentation for the fiscal year ending February 2026, published on April 14. As reported by GameBiz, the company is looking to increase and accelerate its output while further strengthening its TOHO animation brand and other in-house studios, aiming to build a supply system that would be able to deliver 30 anime seasons (or cours, meaning about 12 episodes broadcast continuously over a 3-month period) per year.
According to the presentation, Toho will be shifting its anime production towards a “full-blown mass production phase.” By February 2029, the company expects to reach a quota of about 20 anime seasons released per year, aiming to achieve a production scope of 30 anime seasons per year by 2032. While this means Toho and its studios will be pumping out an increasing number of anime titles, the final goal of the strategy is to strengthen the revenue base for its IPs through multi-faceted monetization. This will also include long-term revenue from IP serialization, streaming, overseas expansion, and merchandise.
Simultaneously, in order to support the scale of their mass-production phase, Toho will be looking to strengthen their production framework through both internal and external investment. While enhancing the capabilities of their in-house TOHO animation STUDIO and Science SARU, the company will also be actively collaborating with external studios. One part of this strategy is their recent investment in Beastars studio Orange.
As the company describes, this new strategy comes as their anime business evolves from being a secondary revenue source, overtaking the film business to become the new “pillar” of the company. Going forward, Toho will be aiming to move away from over-reliance on existing popular IPs and create a system that can consistently produce new hit IPs.
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I… dont like this tbh. I already feel like modern anime is way less creative and much more mass manufactured and this is just the nail in the coffin, gonna coin the term animeslop now lol
Everything ends up inevitably as slop eventually nowadays, I guess…
On one hand I hope them expanding to “anime mass scale production” whatev means they will open more jobs for aspiring junior animators and such, but otoh… we know how capitalism actually works and they def wouldn’t give jackshit about workers and such, and this mass scale production only means animators worked beyond death for more ¥¥¥ for the filthy greedy anime production committees, which is Toho is one of those demona
Yeah. But I have seen a lot of good anime series too. I would love to own Zenshu (it’s a guilty pleasure) it’s a good show but it suffers from not having enough time for world building, growth in romantic relationships it suffers from like the 12 episode thing. There’s only 12 or 13 episodes so there’s many problems due to it being that short. They need to make the anime in a longer series 25 to 100 episodes maybe more.
Fr fr 10O percent agree with you. I don’t care for this anime either. There are better ones IMO.
Quality > Quantity but sadly the Anime Industry has to keep learning it the hardway. Jevons Paradox strikes again.
It should always be quality over quantity. They can do the route of different quality teams, but they still have to compete for people’s time. Gotta be worth it.