Before we start today, I want to give a little plug for my upcoming award season event.

It's called Stories of the Season, and it is a showcase for some of the biggest actors,

artisans, talent of the award season.

We've got a bunch of the top contenders for this year's award season.

I'm doing a live edition of the town with Chloe Schau, who is directed Hamnet, one of the big awards contenders.

We got an actors panel with El Fanning, Will Arnett, Tessa Thompson, Jesse Clemens.

My colleague Lauren Sherman at Puck is doing a costume design panel, a bunch of other things.

This was for awards voters, but I do try to allow some listeners of the town to attend.

So what I'm going to do is the first five people who

email the town at Spotify.com and request two tickets to this awards vent. It's Friday,

the 14th of November at 5 o'clock in Hollywood. First five people who do that will get an invite

to join us. So if you're interested in that,

give me an email and we'll get you in. It is Thursday, November 13th. If you look at the box

office this fall, a couple titles stand out. Demon Slayer Infinity Castle. It opened to a whopping

$70 million in this country and it's grossed

nearly $600 million worldwide so far. It's the biggest domestic opening and the highest

grossing movie of the season that was released in Japan in July. And Chainsaw Man, the movie.

It's number one during its debut weekend in this country, and it grows to 150 million worldwide.

What are these movies have in common? Both released by Sony Pictures, the Hollywood studio arm of the Japanese electronics company, and they're both anime titles.

You don't need me to tell you that anime and manga is huge and a growing business.

Once considered niche or hard to find, the Japanese animation style

is increasingly popular, everything from Spiderverse movies to K-pop demon hunters, especially

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