My Hero Academia Has Paved The Way For Jujutsu Kaisen Overseas, Says TOHO CEO

In a recent interview with Toho CEO VIPO, the spotlight shone on My Hero Academia’s influence on the current anime landscape outside Japan.

On April 8, VIPO released an interview with Toho CEO Hiroyasu Matsuoka. During the interview, he shared that TOHO animation was struggling before the arrival of My Hero Academia.

He shared that, “Around that time, I was in charge of overseas at the time, and overseas distribution companies began to visit me daily for negotiations.

They desperately wanted to get their hands on My Hero Academia. We found them raising their offers despite their previous ones still under review, and rival companies were also entering the market, driving up the price further with increasingly exceptional numbers.”

He further shared how this incident helped them recognize the potential for anime’s success overseas.

Matsuoka said, “This prompted us to recognize the potential for anime to succeed overseas, and we began to focus on expanding our business overseas.

Of course, we needed to address the domestic market, but motivated by how we could expand anime overseas, we didn’t overlook the rapidly expanding anime boom.

We had already built up a network to a certain extent, so we were able to handle works such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and The Apothecary Diaries.”

Although the interview was released in 2024, it was conducted in 2023. Matsuko also shared in the interview that he was most excited for the release of Kaiju No. 8 among the productions being released in 2024.

About My Hero Academia

My Hero Academia is a manga series written and illustrated by Kōhei Horikoshi. It has been serialized in Shueisha’s shōnen manga magazine, Weekly Shōnen Jump, since July 2014, with its chapters additionally collected into 39 tankōbon volumes as of November 2023.

It inspired many spin-off manga, including My Hero Academia: Smash!!, Vigilantes, and Team-Up Missions. Besides light novels, stage plays, and souvenirs, the franchise has produced many video games.

Studio Bones produced the first season from April to June 2016, a second from April to September 2017, a third from April to September 2018, a fourth from October 2019 to April 2020, a fifth from March to September 2021, a sixth from October 2022 to March 2023, and a seventh that is currently in production.

It has three animated films, My Hero Academia: Two Heroes, Heroes Rising, and World Heroes’ Mission, plus nine original video animations. The fourth animated film and a live-action Legendary Entertainment film are currently being planned.

Crunchyroll describes Season 1 of My Hero Academia as follows:

Izuku has dreamt of being a hero all his life—a lofty goal for anyone, but especially challenging for a kid with no superpowers. That’s right, in a world where eighty percent of the population has some kind of super-powered “quirk,” Izuku was unlucky enough to be born completely normal. But that’s not enough to stop him from enrolling in one of the world’s most prestigious hero academies.

Source: CBR