By standard Hollywood logic, the recently-announced anime film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, is not a movie that should exist. Animation for adults hardly ever gets released in American theaters, and when it does, it's either broad comedies or limited arthouse releases. Traditional animation is pretty much a dead art form as far as American theatrical animation is concerned. When anime plays in American theaters, it's typically in the form of limited-run event screenings.
And yet The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is a hand-drawn anime feature film in a blockbuster fantasy franchise for adult audiences set for a wide theatrical release in the United States. The fact a Lord of the Rings anime is being made is itself exciting, but the fact it's getting the full theatrical treatment signals a potential game-changer for anime, traditional animation and adult animation in the United States.
Anime and more serious-minded adult cartoons are growing increasingly mainstream, but this mainstream acceptance is mostly the product of television and streaming platforms rather than movie studios. Hand-drawn animation has always been the norm on television despite almost completely disappearing from theaters. A Lord of the Rings anime movie is the type of thing you might ordinarily expect as HBO Max's attempt to compete with Netflix's growing library of anime co-productions, or maybe to be released in the manner of Warner Bros.' DC or Mortal Kombat direct-to-video movies. Giving anime the blockbuster treatment is new.
While War of the Rohirrim has almost certainly been in development for a while now, the recent commercial success of Demon Slayer: Mugen Train certainly couldn't have hurt WB's confidence in anime's potential in American theaters. Building off the popularity of the Demon Slayer anime series and a wave of hype from its record-breaking box office in Japan, the Demon Slayer film became the first anime since Pokemon: The First Movie to top America's weekend box office charts and has now made over $47 million in the States.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim will almost certainly beat both Demon Slayer and Pokemon to become the highest-grossing anime movie in the United States. Even if anti-animation prejudice cuts its box office potential in half from the last Hobbit movie, that would still make it the first anime to surpass $100 million at the American box office. It would presumably be the first PG-13 animated film to pass that mark since The Simpsons Movie and the first 2D-animated film to do so since The Princess and the Frog. Considering how low Japanese anime budgets tend to be, even a modest gross could turn a huge profit.
Of course, just because the LOTR anime is getting such great treatment doesn't mean this support will trickle down to other anime. The big unspoken reason why anime hasn't been seen as "mainstream" in the US despite its popularity over the last two decades is that American mass media companies just aren't as interested in things they don't own outright. War of the Rohirrim is an authentic anime production, directed by Kenji Kamiyama and animated at Sola, but an American studio ultimately has control over the film and its intellectual property. Its potential success might be more likely to inspire more American IP-based anime than it is to help original anime get wide releases.
Even with that in mind, however, War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a big deal. Unless it somehow ends up a complete bomb, it will absolutely have a positive effect on the market for adult-oriented and traditionally-animated movies, and while it could impact the anime industry in any number of ways, it's going to make history regardless.
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