'Sword Art Online' Director Claims "Influential Power Of Hollywood Movies Has Been Weakening"

Jan 09, 2026

Tomohiko Ito, the director of Sword Art Online, shared his opinion that “the influential power of Hollywood movies has been weakening” and that anime is filling the vacuum.

While discussing the success of recent anime film such as Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle and Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc, Ito told Japanese website Daily Shincho, via Automaton West, “I’ve also recently heard the news that Toho had acquired a British anime distribution company, but I get the impression it was actually when Aniplex acquired Crunchyroll in 2020 that Japanese anime started exploding in popularity across the globe. Taking into consideration the WGA strike from a few years ago and the influence of Covid, it also seems like the influential power of Hollywood movies has been weakening, so I think [Japanese anime] have managed to become a good replacement for them."

It’s hard to argue with his assessment that the influence of Hollywood is in decline. The domestic box office has been in consistent decline over the last few years. That’s even more pertinent given ticket prices have increased. So even with higher ticket prices the overall grosses are down meaning there’s been a significant decline in tickets sold meaning fewer and fewer people are going to see movies.

The-Numbers reports that the the domestic box office gross in 2025 only hit an estimated $8.69 billion. That’s just shy of 1% increase from 2024. However, it’s still down nearly 30% compared to 2019, before the Covid panic, where grosses reached $11.2 billion.

On top of the box office decline there has been a significant decline in viewership surrounding awards shows for films. The Oscars hit peak viewership in 1998 with 57.25 million viewers. Last year it only managed to attract 19.7 million and that’s including streaming and digital. That’s a decline of 65%. Even if you just look back to 2019, it declined nearly 30% from 29.6 million viewers.

And while Ito believes that anime is filling the gap, it’s more than likely been overwhelmingly filled by the online influencer. For example, MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson has achieved over 104 billion views on just his primary YouTube channel alone. TikTok influencer Charli D’Amelio regularly achieves 500 million to 1 billion views on her clips.

On top of his assessment that Hollywood influence is waning and anime is filling the gap, Ito also shared a warning about anime worrying about “global appeal.”

“There have actually been many cases where focusing too much on 'global appeal' has led to failure,” he shared. “I think Japanese people's idea of what could be well-received worldwide is probably something people overseas don't enjoy. However, the emphasis on political correctness is strong in America, so they might think Japan is the only country that still produces works in which scantily clad girls battle, the kind of stuff that would be considered strange in North America."

Unfortunately, Ito’s comments about America were closer to the truth about 40 years ago. Today, not so much, as our culture has been overrun with pornography and smut and women wear underwear as “swim suits.”

Nevertheless, Ito is right that global appeal in the form of slavery to the various tentacles of woke ideology has led to failure. One need look no further than Square Enix’s Forspoken or Netflix’s live-action Death Note.

Where Japanese media does succeed in series like My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer is in dramatizing hardwired truths. As Tolkien so eloquently explained in On Fairy Stories, “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a ‘consolation’ for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, ‘Is it true?’ … But in the ‘Eucatastrophe’ we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.”