Doug Montgomery

It depends on who.

There are others like me who've been around for a while who were pushing anime on Warner Brothers in 2005.

And there are others like, oh, look at this new IP mine that we can stick our digger in and find something new and wonderful to promote.

And there's another viewpoint from Japan where it's been popular for a long time.

And now it's kind of getting recognition overseas that it didn't get before.

So it kind of depends on whose viewpoint you're asking.

Honestly, I would say they're a little bit frustrated because they're not capturing the fat of the money.

Why not?

Well, mainly because of the middlemen, Amazon, Netflix, Crunchyroll are capturing the bulk of it.

To a large extent, you kind of now have really two main buyers of anime, Netflix and Crunchyroll.

So with only two buyers, it's kind of difficult.

And then Crunchyroll is often the first buyer.

And then they sub-license off the Netflix.

So you could argue that there's really...

Quite frankly, kind of one buyer.

That's not a good environment for a producer.

One very good example has to do with two of the biggest titles of the last, you know, four or five years, kind of according to, you know, how analytics, you know, calculates audience demand.

And one title would be Game of Thrones.

And the other would be a title called Attack on Titan.

In 2019, Parrot's most in-demand TV series in the world was Game of Thrones.