5 Anime Running the 2020s. Each One Is Reaching People Anime Has Never Reached Before.
By Jimigrimm
Anime isn’t growing anymore. It already grew. What’s happening in the 2020s is something different.
Crunchyroll passed 120 million active users. Demon Slayer: Mugen Train outgrossed every Hollywood film in 2020. Anime songs are charting on Billboard. TikTok is saturated with anime edits, cosplay transitions, and reaction content. Celebrities openly rep their favorite series. The question isn’t whether anime is mainstream anymore. That’s settled. The question for the 2020s is: how far can it reach?
The answer, based on what’s already happened this decade, is further than anyone expected. The five shows below aren’t just popular. Each one has reached a specific audience that anime had never fully captured before. And the decade isn’t even over yet.
Fair warning: Demon Slayer launched in 2019 and we covered it in our 2010s piece. Its biggest cultural moments (Mugen Train, the streaming surge, the family audience expansion) happened in the 2020s, and its influence runs through everything on this list. But we’re not double-listing it. Go read that piece if you haven’t.
Jujutsu Kaisen: The Mainstream Culture Audience
If one anime owns the 2020s so far, it’s Jujutsu Kaisen. But what it actually did to the audience goes beyond just being the most popular show.
JJK debuted in late 2020 and landed at the exact moment the pandemic was pushing millions of new viewers toward streaming. It follows Yuji Itadori, a high schooler who swallows the finger of an ancient demon and gets thrown into a world of sorcerers, curses, and impossible choices. The fights are some of the best MAPPA has ever animated. The characters die. The good guys lose. The power system is complex enough to fuel endless debates.
But here’s what JJK did that matters for this list: it made anime part of mainstream cultural conversation the same way prestige TV is. Season 2’s Shibuya Incident arc generated over 1.2 million posts on Twitter within hours of the finale. Jujutsu Kaisen was among the top 10 most discussed TV shows worldwide on X in 2021, alongside Squid Game. Characters like Gojo and Sukuna became cultural fixtures that trended on platforms that have nothing to do with anime.
JJK reached the audience that treats entertainment as cultural currency. The people who talk about what they’re watching the way they talk about music or fashion. Anime used to exist outside that conversation. JJK put it in the center.
Chainsaw Man: The "Too Cool for Anime" Crowd
Chainsaw Man is the anime for people who think most anime is corny. And that audience is bigger than the anime community wants to admit.
Based on Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga, the 2022 anime follows Denji, a broke, desperate teenager who merges with a chainsaw devil and becomes a devil hunter. He doesn’t want to save the world. He wants to eat a decent meal and go on a date. The humor is crude. The violence is extreme. The emotional gut punches come when you least expect them.
MAPPA’s animation brought it to life with cinematic quality. Every episode had a different ending theme and animation, a flex no other anime had attempted. The opening, “KICK BACK” by Kenshi Yonezu, became a global hit. But the real story is who showed up for it.
Chainsaw Man pulled in the audience that had always dismissed anime as too formulaic, too sentimental, too “anime.” Denji isn’t trying to become the greatest anything. He has no grand dream. He’s just surviving. That raw, cynical honesty cut through the noise and connected with viewers who had been waiting for anime to stop being so earnest all the time. It expanded anime’s reach into the crowd that considers itself too cool for the genre’s usual tropes.
Spy x Family: The Casual Viewer
Spy x Family proved something in the 2020s that no amount of action spectacle could: anime doesn’t need to be intense to reach new audiences. Sometimes it just needs to be warm.
A spy, an assassin, and a telepathic child form a fake family where nobody knows each other’s secrets. The premise could be a thriller. Instead, it’s a comedy about found family, miscommunication, and a little girl named Anya Forger whose facial expressions became a meme language overnight.
The audience Spy x Family captured isn’t the hardcore anime community. It’s the casual viewer. Parents who watched with their kids. Couples who needed something light. People who scrolled past it on a streaming platform and gave it a shot because it looked fun. Spy x Family reached the people who don’t follow anime seasonally, don’t participate in online discourse, and would never go to a convention. They just wanted something good to watch, and they found it.
That audience is massive. And it’s one anime had largely been ignoring in the West. The medium’s biggest hits had always leaned toward action, intensity, and stakes. Spy x Family proved there was an equally large audience for warmth, humor, and charm.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: The Quiet Audience
In a decade dominated by viral moments and high-speed action, Frieren debuted in 2023 and proved that the most powerful thing anime can do is slow down.
The show follows an immortal elven mage who outlives her adventuring party and then spends decades retracing their journey, trying to understand the human connections she didn’t fully appreciate when her friends were alive. No massive battles. No villain threatening the world. The tension comes from time itself.
Frieren won Anime of the Year at the 2024 Crunchyroll Awards. But the audience it reached is just as important as the award. Frieren captured viewers who had been waiting for anime to offer something contemplative. People who love slow cinema, who read literary fiction, who appreciate stories that sit with you instead of rushing past you. These viewers existed but anime hadn’t been giving them much to work with in the mainstream conversation.
Frieren expanded what the 2020s anime audience was willing to embrace. Not every hit has to be loud. Not every great anime needs a fight scene every episode. Sometimes the most powerful thing a show can do is ask you to sit with a feeling. Frieren proved there’s a mainstream audience for that.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners: The Non-Anime Audience
This is the pick that challenges what anime even is. And that challenge is exactly why it’s here.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a 2022 Netflix original animated by Studio Trigger, based on the video game Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red. Not a manga adaptation. Not a light novel. A Western video game IP animated by a Japanese studio for a Western streaming platform.
After it premiered, Cyberpunk 2077’s player count spiked over 300%. Over a million concurrent players returned to a game that had been considered dead. The anime didn’t just promote the game. It resurrected it. Edgerunners won Anime of the Year at the 2023 Crunchyroll Awards.
The audience Edgerunners reached is the one anime hadn’t cracked yet: the gaming community that specifically avoided anime. These are people who play AAA titles, follow game culture, but had never watched an anime series. Edgerunners met them in their world, through an IP they already cared about, and delivered something so good the anime community claimed it as their own.
The model is now being replicated across the industry. If anime can take a Western gaming IP and turn it into an award-winning series that converts non-anime viewers, the ceiling for who anime can reach just got a lot higher.
Honorable Mentions
Solo Leveling (2024). Based on a Korean manhwa, further blurring the lines of what “anime” means. One of the biggest debuts of 2024 and a sign that the source material for anime is expanding beyond Japan.
Oshi no Ko (2023). Its opening theme “IDOL” by YOASOBI topped the Billboard Global 200 Excl. U.S. chart with 45.7 million streams, becoming the first anime song to reach that level. Reached the music audience in a way no anime had before.
Dandadan (2024). Science SARU’s wild blend of supernatural action, romance, and comedy. One of the most buzzed-about new anime of 2024. A potential future staple on lists like this.
Bocchi the Rock! (2022). A slice-of-life comedy about a socially anxious guitarist. Built a passionate fanbase without action, fantasy, or stakes. Proved anime doesn’t need any of those things to connect.
The Decade Isn't Over
We’re halfway through the 2020s and anime has already reached mainstream cultural conversation audiences, the “too cool for anime” crowd, casual viewers, literary/contemplative audiences, and the gaming community. Five years ago, most of those groups weren’t part of the anime conversation at all.
What’s left? Who hasn’t anime reached yet? And which show from 2026 or 2027 is going to be the one that brings them in?
This list is alive. Tell us what you’d change in the comments.
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