How we helped launch the biggest anime opening in U.S. history.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — Infinity Castle
A theatrical anime release with a fraction of a studio tentpole's marketing budget — and one weekend to turn a passionate-but-niche fanbase into the widest opening America had ever seen for the genre. We ran the awareness engine: a hyper-targeted omnichannel play built to find every fan and follow them from the mall to the living room.
- $0.0M
- North American box office
- #1
- Non-English film ever in the U.S.
- $0M
- Opening weekend — a genre record
All of it on a shoestring media budget — precision, not spend.
The challenge
A passionate audience, a national stage, and a fraction of a studio budget.
Anime has one of the most devoted fanbases on earth — and, in the U.S., one of the most underestimated. The job wasn't to convince fans to care; it was to reach all of them, plus the next ring of casual viewers, in a single opening window — and to do it without the nine-figure media budget a Hollywood tentpole takes for granted.
That meant no waste. Every dollar had to land on someone genuinely likely to buy a ticket opening weekend, and the campaign had to compound — a single impression turning into a sequence that followed each fan from the street to the screen at home.
The approach
Find every fan. Follow them everywhere. Skip everyone else.
A three-stage omnichannel play, engineered for precision rather than reach-at-any-cost.
Take the fandom's own turf
Digital out-of-home placements in the anime, comic, and collectible shops of every major mall in the country — putting the film in front of core fans in the exact places they already gather.
Retarget by proximity
Everyone in proximity to those screens got re-served across Display, CTV, and OTT — turning one street-level impression into a multi-touch sequence that followed fans from the mall to the couch.
Model the perfect viewer
We fed Crunchyroll viewership signals into ArcForesight to model and find look-alike super-fans nationwide — spending on the precise opening-weekend audience instead of buying broad.
Why it worked
Precision beats spend.
The campaign never tried to out-spend a studio. It tried to out-target one. By starting in the physical places the core audience already gathers, retargeting that exact crowd across every screen they own, and modeling the ideal viewer off real viewership signals, the budget only ever moved against people who were genuinely likely to show up.
That's the whole company in one campaign: systems and media, built to find the right person and ignore everyone else — and to make a small budget hit like a large one.
Box-office figures: Variety, Anime News Network & Crunchyroll, 2025.
See what we'd do with your budget.
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