May 14, 2026 7:55am PT

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’

Naman Ramachandran

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Naman Ramachandran

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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.

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.

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“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 screenw

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'