During the APAC Content Showcase in Singapore, Disney has announced that it is expanding it’s partnership with Japanese publisher Kodansha to co-produce more original anime for the Disney+ streaming service. The expanded partnership will include licensing manga titles based on Kodansha publications.
Disney has been partnering with Kodansha since back in 1950 when they did a manga book of various popular Disney characters. Even today they publish a monthly ‘Disney Fan’ magazine and various other Disney related books.
The first Kodansha anime coming will be based on ‘Tokyo Revengers: Christmas Showdown Arc’ that will launch on Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar in January 2023.
Anime is popular world-wide
The Hollywood Reporter pointed out that Parrot Analytics has found that the overall global demand for anime content has gone up 118% since 2020. It’s a good move on Disney’s part as anime is extremely popular around the world and so is Korean (K-drama) content, which Disney is also moving in on. This all works for me as I’m a huge fan of both.
Carol Choi, Disney’s Executive VP of Original Content Strategy in APAC said:
“We are thrilled to deepen our strategic collaboration with our long standing partner Kodansha on such an exciting genre. Japanese anime fills the white space in our content development plans and we believe this expanded collaboration will be a game changer in Disney’s future animation strategy in Japan. We look forward to bringing the anime titles and prized IP by Kodansha to the world stage.”
Luke Kang, Disney President of APAC also made this statement in regards to bringing over content from the region:
“We are focusing our content development on what we refer to as our content whitespace. Investing in areas that require more local specificity – either due to high popularity in select markets, like Japanese anime, K-dramas or Indonesia rom-coms and horror, or the need for local storytelling with talent that are familiar to our local audiences.”
All of these markets are hot right now. It’s a really smart move for Disney and for their various markets.
What do you think? Comment and let us know!
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
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