🎬 Five anime studios are about to become one company. If you watch KADOKAWA shows from outside Japan, this is not an announcement about more anime.

Five companies, one back office, five nameplates

On September 8, 2026, KADOKAWA said it would fold five of its animation studios into one company, Studio One Base, scheduled to launch in November 2026. The five are ENGI, Studio KADAN, Chiptune, Bellnox Films and Raging Bull. KADOKAWA will own 100 percent of it. Takeshi Kikuchi becomes president and representative director, and the company starts with about 310 staff. Its head office is Sunshine City in Ikebukuro, the Tokyo complex most overseas fans know as a place to buy merchandise.

The studio names survive. KADOKAWA says the five keep their names, brands and production lines after the merger. What actually fuses is the layer viewers never see: management and back-office functions, aimed at better working conditions and production efficiency. The credit on the next ENGI show will still read ENGI.

This is the third step of a production reform plan KADOKAWA calls Create the creators, create the place. Step one, announced March 5, 2026, was the Ikebukuro hub itself, a shared floor for about 400 people. Step two, on March 31, 2026, was KADOKAWA Creators, a studio built around hiring and training newcomers as salaried staff.

The new company has about 310 people, not 400. The hub gathers KADOKAWA's own anime departments alongside the studios, so the merger covers only the studios.

The studio that is not joining

KADOKAWA's own business page lists six wholly owned anime studios. The announcement does not dwell on that number. Five of them are merging; the sixth, Doga Kobo, is not.

Doga Kobo was founded in 1973, made Oshi no Ko, and became a KADOKAWA subsidiary on July 11, 2024. Kinema Citrus, of Made in Abyss, sits further out still: KADOKAWA holds 31.8 percent of it.

Seen through that filter, the logic of the merger sharpens. KADOKAWA has expanded its production base since 2018 through new studios and acquisitions, and the group's studios have delivered 48 titles and 486 episodes in total. The five being folded together are a set of capabilities rather than brands: a 3DCG house, a compositing and CG house, each strong at one stage of the pipeline. They are a natural group to put on one set of contracts and one payroll. Doga Kobo is a different proposition: half a century of work and a name of its own before KADOKAWA ever bought it. KADOKAWA has left it alone.

The number that says this will not add titles

By KADOKAWA's own count, roughly 70 anime titles now air or stream in Japan every quarter, up from 40 to 50 in earlier years. Against that, the company is targeting 20 in-house titles by the fiscal year ending March 2028. In-house means animated by the group's own studios rather than commissioned from someone else's. The 70 is an industry-wide count for a single quarter and the 20 is one company's annual in-house target, so the two figures do not subtract from each other.

That is the real shape of this. Setting a target for in-house titles at all implies the inverse: much of what KADOKAWA owns is still animated by studios outside the group. A merger does not create animators, and it does not add slots to a broadcast quarter. What it moves, on the most natural reading, is work from other people's studios into its own.

So the number of KADOKAWA titles reaching Crunchyroll in a given season is still set by how many light novels and manga get greenlit, not by this announcement. What can plausibly change is second-order: easier scheduling between sister studios and, if it works, fewer of the delay notices that have become a fixture of recent seasons.

KADOKAWA is fairly open that this is defensive. It frames the merger as a response to a staffing shortage and rising production costs set against growing global demand.

Why the pressure is coming from abroad

That demand is measurable. Japan's anime industry was worth $25 billion in 2024, and the overseas portion of it was $14.1 billion, up 26.0 percent year on year, according to the Association of Japanese Animations. Overseas is now the larger half, and it is the half that keeps growing. Dollar figures here use a rate of 153.4 yen to the dollar as of September 10, 2026.

KADOKAWA's answer on the distribution side comes with a partner attached. KADOKAWA and Sony announced a capital and business alliance on December 19, 2024, and on January 7, 2025 Sony took about 10 percent of KADOKAWA's voting rights, becoming its largest shareholder. Sony owns Crunchyroll. KADOKAWA owns Yen Press, having acquired a 51 percent stake in 2016. Anime business journalist Tadashi Sudo argues the two can split territory, with Sony strong in North America and Europe and KADOKAWA strong in Asia.

The target is on the record too. KADOKAWA's mid-term plan puts group revenue at $2.6 billion for the fiscal year ending March 2032, with $650 million of that coming from overseas. Hitting it requires a reliable supply of titles the company controls from novel to merchandise. The stated aims of the merger are stronger IP creation and maximizing lifetime value from each property, which in plainer language means owning the show and selling it for a long time.

What a merger cannot do

A combined back office does not draw a single frame. The people who do that work are exactly the ones the industry cannot hire enough of, which is why KADOKAWA Creators, the training arm announced in March, may end up mattering more to what you watch a few years from now than this month's corporate news.

Sho Tanaka, KADOKAWA's Chief Anime Officer, framed the announcement around building a sustainable production base while global demand grows. Takeshi Kikuchi, the incoming president, put it in terms of giving creators an environment where they can concentrate on the work. Whether the savings from a shared payroll department reach the desks where the animation happens is what no press release can settle.

In Japan, the argument about consolidation in creative industries usually comes down to one question: does scale protect the people doing the work, or only the margins? When studios or publishers merge in your country, which way does it tend to go?

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