Taiki Sakurai reflected on his role at Netflix as Chief Anime Producer (2017–2023) in an interview with Toyo Keizai, admitting that it would’ve been a better strategy to license the rights to stream a completed anime over heavily funding an anime from its inception, which didn’t fare as well.
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Sakurai said, “It’s becoming more widely accepted that monopolizing the rights in one company doesn’t offer much benefit to either Netflix or the creators. Even for Leviathan [Netflix original series], selling only the streaming rights to Netflix where a committee has been adopted would be cheaper for Netflix than a 100% investment. This trend was already emerging around the time I left Netflix.“
Anime is most commonly produced under a production committee, which typically owns and administers the copyright of an anime. Copyright ownership confers the ability (or the right) to decide what can be done with the anime. Therefore, it allows committees to sell permission to other companies to use their anime. In the buying company’s case, this is acquiring a license. For example, Netflix may acquire a license to stream an anime on its app, make merchandise derived from that anime, or screen the anime in theaters (ha). Licenses are often temporary, and, depending on what rights are being licensed, can cost hundreds of thousands to millions to acquire.
Nevertheless, while some licenses grant sweeping freedom to do certain things, there are natural limitations since the underlying ownership of the anime still belongs to someone else. Rather than licenses—potentially expensive and only temporary—Netflix has frequently made offers to permanently acquire or transfer all of the underlying rights, allowing it (within legal limits) to do whatever it wants with the anime. This is even more expensive than licensing, but it unlocks a level of freedom that can prove profitable with the right strategy. This wasn’t the case for Netflix.
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Under Sakurai, Netflix frequently opted for large investments into anime productions, branded as Netflix Originals, where perhaps it would’ve been better to license/acquire the streaming rights from a production committee that was developing an anime. With Netflix producing fewer Originals post-pandemic, Sakurai was asked whether this indicated that the strategy wasn’t commercially successful:
“To be self-critical, yes, that’s the case. Even though we produced all sorts of original anime, in the end, the anime [whose streaming rights] we cheaply bought from external production committees were the ones being watched. So discussions of ‘Why is there even a need for us to go out of our way to come up with anime ourselves?’ arose.“
“While it’s something that couldn’t be helped for a company under pressure to generate short-term profits, I feel deeply ashamed that we couldn’t deliver results. But even the likes of Miyazaki and Takahata took time to achieve success.“
“Creators are important, but what’s lacking are producers who believe in hits and turn them into hits. Director Makoto Shinkai [Suzume] is a genius, but I want to say that Mr. [Noritaka] Kawaguchi of Comix Wave Films, who kept believing Shinkai could absolutely sell, is also a genius. I think it’s important to keep giving the studios and creators we believe in another chance at the batter’s box.“
In the full interview, Sakurai and long-time friend Justin Leach, the founder of Qubic Pictures, discuss international coproductions and the limitations of Netflix’s marketing, for example, in the case of Leviathan (which Qubic produced), among other topics.
Source: Toyo Keizai
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