If you’ve ever wondered why every season seems packed with stories where an ordinary person dies and reincarnates in another world as an invincible being, the answer isn’t a lack of imagination from creators but the wallets of the international audience. Veteran producer Yusuke Onuki, president of Bushiroad Move, decided to explain bluntly the cold financial math that currently dominates the anime industry.

As Onuki detailed, producing a standard twelve-episode series for late-night television requires an investment of around 350 million yen today, equivalent to about $2.3 million. The staggering fact is that nearly ninety percent of the money needed to recoup that initial investment comes directly from international streaming platforms. The domestic market in Japan, which once relied on disc and physical merchandise sales, now occupies a secondary financial position.

This overwhelming reliance on foreign capital completely changed planning meetings at studios. The million-dollar question is no longer whether Japanese audiences will like a story, but how high the guaranteed offer from an international platform will be before the premiere. Under this low-risk investment logic, reincarnation light novels and parallel universe stories became the star product, as their premise doesn’t require complex cultural explanations and their prior readership gives investors certainty that the series will cross borders successfully.

However, the producer warned that this business model is starting to show cracks. The supply of reincarnation novels with guaranteed success is rapidly depleting after years of adapting the same repetitive concepts. For Onuki, the current saturation isn’t a creative failure of authors or a whim of the audience, but the logical consequence of a system where nine out of ten yen invested come from outside Japan.

With over sixty production credits in television series throughout his career, Yusuke Onuki is one of the most authoritative voices in the corporate side of Japanese entertainment. As president of Bushiroad Move, he has overseen the production of multiple successful commercial isekai series. Beyond his executive work, Onuki recently published a book analyzing the anime’s economic model, detailing the structure of production committees and the money flows that decide which projects make it to the screen.

Knowing that ninety percent of your favorite series’ budgets are paid by international streaming platforms, do you think this economic model is killing creativity in Japan or is it the only way to keep anime alive?