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The story
Sony Pictures Entertainment announced that its subsidiary Crunchyroll has launched a new division to produce live-action adaptations of anime in partnership with Japanese creators. On 5ch’s hardware/industry (“Geha”) board, users debated whether past live-action adaptations have actually succeeded, citing the Saint Seiya live-action film — touted as hugely popular in South America but a box-office flop — and data showing Netflix’s One Piece lost viewership in its second season. The thread also explored why game adaptations like Mario and Resident Evil have thrived at the box office while manga/anime adaptations keep struggling.
Sony Pictures Entertainment announced that its subsidiary Crunchyroll has launched a new division to pursue live-action anime adaptations, among other projects, in partnership with Japanese creators.
Source: eiga.com / Original article here
What people said
The most recent example being that doesn't exactly inspire confidence
Wasn't that like a CG movie from over 20 years ago?
Americans can never make anything but Disney-style stuff, so I bet they just assume anything Japanese must be amazing.
Just my bias, but I get the feeling Sony Pictures and Sony Music (Aniplex) don't get along very well.
That's basically true of action stuff in general.
Mystery or suspense works could pull it off, though.
Like Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil), Tacopi's Origin of Sin, or To Love-Ru?
Netflix has 350 million.
Compared to Netflix, honestly everything except Amazon Prime Video is trash at this point.
They should be working closely with the original creator to develop the project.
That's how the One Piece live-action succeeded.
Though apparently viewership crashed in season 2, putting it in cancellation territory.
Making that up with no source?
Live-action "One Piece" Season 2 also debuts at #1 worldwide. Is Japanese manga saving Netflix?
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/8cf1e57306a62649a8f0873723bae6f4b8cd5d3e
If you're going to call this adaptation a failure,
then no adaptation could ever count as a success.
Viewership dropped to two-thirds of season 1's numbers in season 2, and it's even losing to the Korean drama ranked right above it.
There's always someone falling for these trashy puff-piece articles.
Sony Pictures just put up financing and got the distribution rights for Zelda — they're not involved in production at all.
Even in 2026, maybe think about why Hollywood movies based on manga/anime still haven't succeeded.
The Netflix One Piece drama isn't even a topic of conversation among manga fans, let alone the general public.
And also think about why Hollywood adaptations of games like Mario and Resident Evil have succeeded.
They kept hyping Saint Seiya as a "national anime" in South America, but the moment they made it live-action it flopped hard and has already been forgotten.
That kind of claim always gets exaggerated, so you shouldn't trust anything except hard numbers, like actual game sales figures.
There already is one, actually
ttps://ameblo.jp/yoshinori1408/entry-12861551608.html
JoJo's SBR has only had one episode released, so its viewer numbers are probably pretty high relatively speaking.
The others released whole seasons with multiple episodes, so it's not that impressive by comparison.
Netflix calculates its viewership numbers as total hours watched divided by the runtime of the work (series),
so how few episodes there are doesn't matter.
If anything, watching just 30 minutes gets counted the same as finishing the whole drama series, so that number is massively inflated.
But recently, Sony's own Spider-Man movie made 400 billion yen — is there any Japanese movie or anime that can beat that?
Anime is actually less popular than people think.
Even in the West, only the absolute top-tier mainstream titles get watched.
That's true even for Japanese Netflix-original live-action dramas.
I heard Netflix invested heavily in Japanese original content and anime for a while, but the returns were poor, so they shifted investment back to Korean dramas.
It's such a weak global performer that it's only surviving in its own isolated ("galapagos") domestic bubble.
That's probably why they want to go live-action.
The fact that they poured a movie-level budget into Gas Human (Gasujin) also suggests only movie-grade live-action actually gets any traction.
It's already bad that even Demon Slayer — Japan's undisputed #1 — only pulled in $400 million overseas; no need to even mention the rest of the pack.
In the end, the numbers make it clear (so unclear it barely registers globally at all), so all people can say is the fuzzy, feel-good line "Japanese anime is popular worldwide!"
I get this a bit.
At the end of the day, live-action is what rakes in the big money.
It's also true that realistic-style games outsell anime-style ones.
Though live-action movies cost more to make than anime, so there's more risk.
It's close to 4 trillion yen though — isn't that actually impressive?
According to the Association of Japanese Animations, the global market size for Japanese anime in 2024 (preliminary figures) hit a record high of 3.8407 trillion yen. Of that, the overseas market accounted for 2.1702 trillion yen (up 26% year-on-year), exceeding the domestic market for the second year running and driving the overall growth.
That's like a tenth of the game industry's size, though.
Kind of underwhelming.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Netflix’s “viewership” metric is calculated by dividing total hours watched by a title’s total runtime, which means works with fewer episodes are more easily counted as “completed,” and thread posters pointed out that a headline like “#1 in the world” alone doesn’t capture the full picture. According to the Association of Japanese Animations, the global anime market hit a record 3.8407 trillion yen in 2024, with the overseas market up 26% year-on-year — but that figure covers the anime industry as a whole, including streaming and merchandising, and sits on a different axis from the box-office or viewership performance of any individual live-action adaptation. The thread split between those who see the overall market growth as grounds for optimism about live-action adaptations, and those who remain skeptical based on the track record of specific titles like Saint Seiya and One Piece — with each side citing different sets of statistics, which is at the root of the disagreement.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “Sony to Focus on Live-Action Anime Adaptations, Launches New Division with Japanese Creators“.
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