Sony Pictures’ Sanford Panitch Puts Japan at Center of Theatrical Argument at Cannes Film Market: ‘True Global IP Has Never Been Created by a Streaming Service’

Sanford Panitch came to the Cannes Film Market with a thesis he wanted the Japanese entertainment industry to hear: theatrical is still the only window that creates lasting global IP, anime’s moment has arrived, and Japan‘s rights holders are leaving opportunities on the table by waiting too long to engage.

The Sony Pictures Entertainment motion picture group president made those arguments at a session organized by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization – part of the industry programming accompanying Japan’s designation as Country of Honor at this year’s Cannes Film Market, a distinction that has brought an unprecedented concentration of Japanese titles, talent and industry delegations to the Croisette.

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The conversation, moderated by entertainment sociologist Atsuo Nakayama of Re-Entertainment, covered Sony’s approach to Japanese IP, the growth of Crunchyroll and the studio’s strategy for expanding its presence in local Asian content markets.

“True global IP has never been created by a streaming service,” Panitch said flatly, pushing back on the assumption that the volume of content flowing through subscription platforms translates into franchises with real cultural staying power.

His argument rested partly on marketing. Streaming platforms, he said, are structurally disinclined to invest in the kind of theatrical marketing campaigns that studios mount – campaigns that, by their nature, insert a film into the cultural conversation before anyone has seen it. He pointed to “Napoleon,” which Sony distributed theatrically for Apple, and “F1,” released for Apple by Warner Bros., as evidence that even films conceived as streaming titles gain greater audience and greater value on their respective services when given a proper theatrical launch.

Against the backdrop of a streaming landscape he described as having shattered the old monoculture, Panitch argued that anime is particularly well placed. Before the internet, before TikTok, audiences gravitating toward a single shared cultural reference point made mainstream the default ambition. That world is gone. In its place, deep subcultures have formed – and anime, he said, is among the most globally embedded of them.

“Being specific actually is the key to being global,” Panitch said.

Crunchyroll, which Sony acquired in 2021, had roughly three million subscribers at the time. It now counts more than 20 million outside Japan – a platform dedicated exclusively to anime that Panitch held up as a measure of how far the subculture has traveled from niche to definitive global audience. The worldwide theatrical run of “Chainsaw Man,” distributed outside Japan by Sony through the Crunchyroll pipeline, struck him as the clearest recent proof of that reach.

“It didn’t have the ‘Demon Slayer’ fanbase,” Panitch said. “It didn’t have the previous films to rely on and yet ‘Chainsaw Man’ was an absolute extraordinary success.”

Panitch attributed the broader Hollywood turn toward Japanese IP in the past few years to a combination of factors: the demonstrable success of properties like “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” prompting a Gold Rush mentality, the role of technology – TikTok, translation tools, AI – in lowering the barrier to understanding source material, and an industry-wide recognition that IP is now essentially the prerequisite for theatrical viability. Originals, he acknowledged, are increasingly difficult to build a box office case around.

On fanship, Panitch drew a line from Kevin Feige’s comic book fluency at Marvel to the new generation of genuine manga and anime superfans now positioned to shepherd adaptations. The lesson of “One Piece” on Netflix, he said, was that deep creative partnership with the original author – understanding what the fanbase needed to recognize as authentic – was the reason the series succeeded where so many earlier Japanese adaptations had not. Hollywood screenwriters meeting manga authors directly, he said, was now part of Sony’s process.

He was candid about what still frustrates Hollywood companies working in Japan. The consortium system and the power of the publishing houses, he said, make for unusually complex dealmaking, and the sequential logic of Japanese IP – moving from manga to anime to local live action before Hollywood enters the picture – means studios often arrive later than is ideal. He said he hoped Japanese companies would feel empowered to demand a stronger creative voice in adaptations, and to open that conversation earlier.

“The sooner the Hollywood side can interact with the IP, the better,” Panitch said. He cited Neil Druckmann’s role as a producer on “Uncharted” – treated as a genuine creative partner rather than a licensor – and Sony’s acquisition of the Japanese-language source novel for “Bullet Train” before an English translation existed as models of what early, trust-based engagement looks like. The goal, he argued, is a 360-degree IP approach in which Japanese companies stop thinking of Hollywood as a downstream destination and start thinking of it as a co-creator.

“We’ve made a real priority to have Japanese product be part of our lineup pretty much with every label at the company now,” Panitch said – not simply because Sony is a Japanese company, but because fandom around Japanese IP has become too commercially significant to treat as secondary.

Sony Pictures International Productions is the largest investor in the live-action “Kingdom” franchise, now heading into its fifth film. Columbia Pictures will open Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil” reboot – based on Capcom’s Japanese video game franchise – on Sept. 18; Cregger, whose credits include “Weapons” and “Barbarian,” is crafting an original story set during the Raccoon City outbreak rather than adapting established game characters. Panitch also confirmed Nintendo creator Shigeru Miyamoto is closely involved in the development of “Legend of Zelda.”

“He is very evolved on everything we do in ‘Zelda,'” Panitch said of Miyamoto. “It really is his movie and we’re just so grateful to be supportive of it.”

Japan’s local box office, Panitch observed, has inverted from roughly 70% Hollywood to approximately 70-80% local content over the span of his career – a shift he said is replicated across Korea, India and Southeast Asia. For the right Hollywood partner, he suggested, that is not a sign of a market closing but of one deepening. “I really applaud Cannes for recognizing the power of Japanese cinema and Japanese IP this year,” Panitch said.