Attack on Titan showed the industry just how big anime could get

polygon.com:

Attack on Titan’s opening sequence is one of serene terror: As geese fly high above a sun-soaked rustic town, a gargantuan humanoid figure peeks over the walls with bare, musculature and blank expression. “That day, humanity remembered the terror of being ruled by them,” we’re told through narration, setting up a series permeated by habitual anxiety and prevailing horror. Soon after, Linked Horizon’s “Guren no Yumiya,” an opening theme that will swiftly become iconic in the anime fandom, kicks in and Attack on Titan begins.

To call Attack on Titan a major success is an understatement in every sense of the word. Having recently wrapped up the second part of its Final Season (the third, theoretically conclusive part, is set to air in 2023), the team at Wit Studio spun Hajime Isayama’s controversial-but-uber-popular manga into an anime sensation. But the series is more than just a hit; it’s come to represent the anime industry itself, a business currently swelling and gaining more worldwide notoriety than ever before.

To understand Attack on Titan’s position as a powerhouse in the current anime arms race — a race conducted among streaming services and distributors vying for profit and, often more important, the goodwill of a dedicated, expanding fanbase — one has to look back to anime’s emergence through the aughts. In the late 1990s, series like PokémonandDragon Ball Z had proven that anime could not only be popular but lucrative for franchising. It became a part of the general entertainment diet in America, a drastic change from the decades prior, where its presence was often haphazard and surrounded by negative stereotypes about imported Japanese media and the people that consumed it.

By the turn of the millennium, the