By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Hollywood’s inability to get men to watch what it’s been producing. It’s true that men have largely abandoned once male-focused entertainment properties like Star Wars and Marvel, leaving box office totals plummeting and streaming apps like Disney+ scrambling.
That said, Hollywood hasn’t done much better with women. Star Wars lost its male audience because Disney retooled it to try to attract more girls. Girls aren’t interested, so they lost everyone except for a few slop eaters.
While traditional Hollywood has flailed around like a drowning swimmer, anime has flourished. It has flourished by copying the LEGO model to create entertainment products using actual science.
Lego Science Points The Way
For years, LEGO was a boys-only toy. LEGO tried repeatedly to get girls interested, but kept failing. So, in 1997, LEGO commissioned a multi-year ethnographic study, and what they learned from it cracked the code.
In simple terms, the study discovered what most people already knew through common sense: boys and girls approach imagination and play differently. When boys play, they imagine they are the characters. When girls play, they imagine themselves interacting with and manipulating the characters.
That fundamental difference makes it impossible to make a toy or a movie that appeals equally to both sexes. So LEGO took what they learned and debuted their LEGO Friends line for girls in 1999. It was an instant hit.
Anime’s LEGO Trajectory
Anime has been on a similar trajectory. Once a niche interest only watched by nerdy young men on bootleg DVDs, the genre has become a sensation among girls in the past ten years.
It did this not by warping and feminizing existing male-focused anime properties in an effort to get girls involved, but rather by creating new anime stories purposely written with girls in mind.
Modern anime contains many different subgenres specifically designed to target different audiences. Shonen anime like Naruto is aimed at teen boys. Shojo like the relationship drama Fruits Basket is intended for teen girls. Seinen is more extreme and intended for adult men. Josei is for adult women. There’s even Kodomo, like Pokémon, which is for young kids.
Now, streaming services like Crunchyroll are exploding, offering thousands of anime shows for both sexes. Adventure shows like One Piece are wildly popular with males, while girls are watching Shojo anime focused on relationships and romance as first principles. No one is trying to convince girls to start watching Naruto, and boys are perfectly content to let girls enjoy Fruits Basket.
This weekend, an anime-style movie called KPop Demon Hunters was the biggest box office winner, and the audience was comprised entirely of teen girls. In a few weeks, the Shonen anime Demon Slayer (similar name, totally different) will debut its first theatrical film, and that audience will likely be almost entirely made up of teenage boys.
Anime Is Giving Audiences What They Want, While Hollywood Tells Them What They SHOULD Want
Anime is giving audiences what they want, making tons of money, and everyone watching it is happy.
Meanwhile, Hollywood is heading to ruin. They’ve ignored the most basic and fundamental science, ignored common sense, and abandoned a formula of movies for men and movies for women that used to work in the name of trying to force women to watch Marvel movies and Star Trek. It hasn’t worked; women aren’t watching, and now men aren’t either.
Take a lesson from Anime and LEGO. It’s not too late to follow the science. Stop stealing Star Trek from men so you can give it to women. They don’t want it.
