Netflix has signed a huge deal with Studio Colorido to produce three anime movies for the streaming site, starting with Drifting Home premiering this year.
According to a statement released by Netflix on Tuesday, April 26, this is the first time Netflix is striking a studio deal with a Japanese feature animation studio, since the success of the film A Whisker Away.
All We Know About The Movies
Drifting Home – which will premiere on the streaming site on September 16 – will now be followed by two further additional Studio Colorido films due to premiere on Netflix, among which one project will be directed by Tomotaka Shibayama and will launch in 2024.
In the trailer for the first of the trio of movies gives viewers a look into the lives of the main characters, like childhood friends Kosuke and Natsume, as hey live out their carefree childhoods and explore the condemned apartment building they used to live in.
However, things take a sudden turn when the youngsters wake up in the apartment to find it drifting in the sea, and must overcome a series of testing challenged that may threaten their friendships.
For those who’d love to see it on a bigger screen than their TV or tablet may be in luck as Yuji Yamano, Netflix’s director of Japan content, said they were looking into theatrical releases for the movies.
He said: ‘We will also explore theatrical releases for upcoming films we co-produce, in addition to their Netflix premieres. The first example of that will be Drifting Home, which will premiere on Netflix and in theaters on the same day.’
Subscribers Love Anime
It looks like the deal may just be a lucrative one – not just for Netflix but the subscribers as Netflix’s director of anime Kohei Obara claimed that half of its subscribers globally watched anime on the service in 2021, during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Obara said: ‘The popularity of anime has been rising quite a bit in recent years. Anime has been big here in Japan for over seven or eight decades, ever since Osamu Tezuka created the first anime title.
‘But in recent years, its popularity has been growing a lot internationally. At Netflix, more than well over half of our subscribers globally have watched anime in the past year, which is an incredible number.
‘In Japan, at least 90 percent of our subscribers have been watching anime. In Japan, it’s always been very big, but the popularity has been rising on a global basis quite a lot as well.’
Not only this, in the Netflix release Yamano said their last release, A Whisker Away, was in one of the top ten most watched movies in over 30 countries, world wide.
‘Audiences around the world loved the charming, whimsical romance told in A Whisker Away,’ he said: ‘It became one of the Top 10 most watched films in over 30 countries. To us, Studio Colorido’s ability to bring to life entirely original stories in high-quality 2D animation was magical.’