Chinese domestic animation summer slot: the year-long ongoing series *Renegade Immortal* and *Slay the Gods* hold the market ground, while AI-generated animation dramas expand the market scale?
This summer film season, animation still maintains a strong presence, and has even become the most stable force in cinemas.
According to statistics from China Film Administration: from June 1 to August 31, the total box office of the 2026 summer film season reached 124.98 billion yuan, with 340 million moviegoers. Among them, the domestic animation *The Eight Immortals!* grossed 1.846 billion yuan, ranking third in the summer season box office. In addition, *To Your Island* and *The Three Kingdoms Part 1: Fighting for Luoyang* also delivered remarkable performances.
However, when we shift our focus from cinemas to long-video platforms, the situation is far less optimistic. *A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality* and *Renegade Immortal* still occupy top positions, but their viewership has dropped by roughly 20% year-on-year respectively. This year's well-performing new series *Slaughter of the Gods: Mortal Divine Realm Season 2* recorded about 391 million views during the summer period, which still failed to surpass the performance of *Battle Through the Heavens Annual Series* in the same period last year.
In stark contrast is the explosive growth of AI manhua dramas. On short-video platforms, AI manhua dramas are rapidly gaining massive traction. Works such as *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons* have recorded 200 million views in a single day, and there are plenty of AI manhua drama contents in the industry with cumulative views of billions. On one side is the animation film market of over 17 billion yuan, on the other side are AI manhua dramas that rack up 200 million views per day. Caught in the middle, how much room is left for traditional anime series?
Defending the Territory with Annual Anime Series, Sustaining the "Slow Business"?
If we only look at the August annual anime series chart, Chinese domestic anime hardly seems to have changed at all. *A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality*, *Renegade Immortal*, *Cangyuan Tu*, *The Legend of the Spiritual Sovereign*, and *The Great Lord Annual Series* still occupy the top 5 spots of monthly annual anime series.
This model has been verified over years, and has formed a quite mature industrial chain: Popular online novels provide a ready-made user base, long stories guarantee sufficient adaptation space, 3D animations deliver visual upgrades, and platforms continue to update through annual series, converting one-time traffic into long-term follow-up viewership.
*Renegade Immortal* is a typical example. According to Yunhe Data, in the first half of 2026, *Renegade Immortal* accumulated 1.89 billion effective views of official episodes, leading all anime content across the entire network by a large margin. Meanwhile, *Battle Through the Heavens Annual Series* and *Sword of Coming Season 2* both exceeded 1 billion views.
More importantly, for long-video platforms, anime content is not just a performance indicator of viewership, but can directly drive paid subscriptions. This summer, Tencent Video launched the finale premiere of *Slaughter of the Gods: Mortal Divine Realm Season 2* and *Cha Er No.2 High School Season 6*, the two works respectively took the top 1 and top 5 spots on the platform's overall paid bestseller chart. On Youku's member popularity top 5 chart, where the platform has also been ramping up efforts on anime content in recent years, *Cangyuan Tu* and *Beyond the Light* ranked 3rd and 5th respectively. *A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality* has long been staying at the forefront of Bilibili's member chart and hot comment chart.
This is a type of user relationship that long-video platforms value highly: user stickiness. Han Li from *A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality* and Wang Lin from *Renegade Immortal* are well-known even to audiences who do not watch anime. The IP of *Cha Er No.2 High School*, which focuses on the daily campus life of a group of junior high school students, has been updated for more than ten years, and the protagonists have finally reached their graduation season from the third year of junior high.
This stickiness is also extending beyond the content itself. The report released by Yunhe for the first half of this year shows that top Chinese domestic anime are continuing to tap IP value through methods such as membership value-added services, character peripherals, brand co-branding, and offline activities. Tencent and Bilibili are leaning towards the "character+" industrial chain, while iQiyi and Youku continue to explore value-added services in areas such as membership benefits, movie ticket stubs, and blind boxes.
However, hidden worries also exist. According to the report *2026 H1 Top Online Broadcast, Commercial Performance and IP Value Observation of Anime* released by Yunhe Data: the total effective official episode views of the top 20 anime across the network in the first half of 2026 dropped by 12% year-on-year. Moreover, the top popularity level during this summer season also declined compared with last year, with the decline margin larger than that between last year and the year before last.
When audiences are presented with thousands of new contents every day, "waiting" is becoming an unnecessary cost. How long can the stickiness of annual anime series last? However, the decline does not mean the shrinkage of the entire market. While the basic market of annual series is under pressure, new works are also building momentum to break through.
On the August new anime series chart, *Slaughter of the Gods: Mortal Divine Realm Season 2*, *Cha Er No.2 High School Season 6*, *Ascend on the Selected Day*, *Beyond the Light*, and *The Eternal Ending Season* entered the top 5. Among them, *Slaughter of the Gods: Mortal Divine Realm Season 2* entered the top 10 of effective views of new series in the first half of 2026 only 6 days after its launch, and its urban superpower setting is regarded by the industry as an effective attempt to break the aesthetic fatigue of traditional xianxuan and xianxia content. Old IPs defend their territory while new IPs expand their boundaries, and the "slow business" of annual anime series is still looking for new growth points.
AI Expanding the Market: Betting on the Next Blockbuster?
Obviously, in the layout of sequels to stabilize user stickiness and new series to bring freshness, AI manhua dramas clearly belong to the latter camp.
AI manhua dramas are developing faster and in a more "unrestrained" way. According to data from DataEye Research Institute, the annual market size of domestic AI manhua dramas in 2026 is expected to exceed 400 billion yuan, with a year-on-year growth of 138%; only in the first 5 months, the market size has exceeded 220 billion yuan, and the number of domestic AI manhua drama users in the first half of the year has reached 600 million. AI manhua dramas have already built their own large-scale traffic pool.
The scale of AI manhua dramas has evolved from "individual cases" to "normality". Take the Hongguo platform as an example, as of September 7, the 12th season of *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons* still firmly topped the Hongguo hit chart, and the cumulative views of this series have exceeded 6.08 billion. According to Yunhe's micro-drama data, on August 16, the 11th season of *The Legend of Ten Thousand Demons* reached 225 million effective views in a single day. This season was launched on August 15, and its popularity soared to 124.84 million on the first day.
The total number of collections of the entire series *Our Sword Sect's Favorite Little Junior Sister* exceeds 20 million, with a peak of 270 million daily views; the cumulative views of *Exiled to the Border in Famine Years, My Criminal Wife Reclaims Wasteland and Raises a War God* on Douyin have also exceeded 4.1 billion.
The content supply method at the upstream of the industrial chain is also undergoing transformation. Since the beginning of this year, major platforms have successively entered the AI manhua drama track, which is a clear footnote to this trend. In addition to Tencent launching the independent manhua drama app Little Fire Dragon in February this year, and reportedly planning to launch the independent brand "QQ Manhua Drama", the three major long-video platforms have all launched manhua drama channels, covering genres such as apocalypse, systematic xianxia, romance, and science fiction. Tencent and Youku have also introduced popular manhua drama IPs such as *Deep Love Penetrates the Rest of Your Life*.
Tencent's Huolong Manhua Drama follows the route of "investing heavily in building the App and offering high revenue sharing". Data shows that 5 months after its launch, it has accumulated 70,000 works and more than 20,000 creators, and the daily update volume has grown from 250 at the beginning of the year to more than 1,000. Popular works include *Young Lady, What Did You Adjust the Demon Butler To?*, *Otome Game System Awakens, I Drive Everyone Crazy in the Interstellar*, and *Hot Pot Queen*.
*Young Lady, What Did You Adjust the Demon Butler To?* tells the story of the protagonist who is addicted to the otome game *Demon Butler*, accidentally falls off the building and transmigrates into the game to abuse the four demon butlers. The series gained more than 10,000 collections within 24 hours of launch, making it the first manhua drama on the platform to break 10,000 collections. It is understood that after the series was first released on the Hongguo platform, Huolong Manhua Drama purchased its exclusive broadcast rights.
The commercial level is also constantly refreshing: Tencent Video disclosed at its annual press conference in June that a single manhua drama has obtained a revenue sharing of more than 20 million yuan, while the production cost is only about 400,000 yuan. Huolong Manhua Drama immediately upgraded its revenue sharing rules — the pure sharing coefficient for exclusive cooperative works is increased by up to 240%; for AI realistic human dramas and 3D high-quality dramas, the guaranteed amount per minute of content can reach 10,000 yuan.
In April, iQiyi launched the "Galaxy AI Anime Series Plan", encouraging creators to use AI tools to create long-running series with episodes of more than 5 minutes. It later further announced the cooperation details, opening up three cooperation modes: joint investment and construction, copyright procurement, and exclusive revenue sharing. In August, iQiyi further upgraded the Galaxy AI Anime Series Plan to 2.0, lowering the access threshold to episodes of 3 minutes with a total duration of 120 minutes to qualify for revenue sharing, while opening the platform's own literary IP library for free to creators of short dramas and manhua dramas.
Youku, which launched its manhua drama channel also in February, launched the AI Manhua Drama Jingwei Plan in May. For high-quality projects, Youku provides a maximum of 2 million yuan in guaranteed revenue plus revenue sharing incentives, and offers top S+ level resource support in the manhua drama vertical section on the platform.
It can be said that the paths of the several platforms are different, but their goals are the same: to seize the content production capacity of AI anime in advance.
However, compared with native short dramas and AI manhua drama products, *Entertainment Unicorn* believes that the highlight of internet platforms lies in using AI as a tool to improve and optimize the production efficiency and content quality of traditional anime. After all, what AI changes is the "speed" of animation production, not the "depth" of animation creation.
iQiyi's *Invincible Sword Domain* is a typical representative of this idea. According to reports, with the help of AI technology, its production cycle can be shortened to 1/3 of the original, and the cost can be reduced by more than 50%. Similar cases are emerging densely on multiple platforms. *The Opera Demon* launched by Youku, created by the student team of Shanghai Film Academy of Shanghai University and incubated by Cloud Vision Smart Film, tells the story of three little demons born from traditional opera. For this 8-minute competition short film, the team only spent two weeks to complete it, and about 80% of the content was generated by the AI video platform.
On Bilibili's side, Yuewen Group and Yihuakai Tian jointly announced the launch of the *Cyber Heroes* AI high-quality long anime series project. The project originated from a 24-minute AI animation short film released by veteran animator Zhao Bin (online name "Uncle Zhao, the Sixty-Year-Old Man") of Yihuakai Tian under his personal account. It was launched on Douyin and Bilibili on August 15, and the total views across the network exceeded 10 million within 5 days. This is also the first high-quality long anime series project in the industry that is officially authorized by a web novel IP and deeply integrates traditional animation studios and AI generation technology.
The commercial logic of AI manhua dramas is different from that of traditional anime series. Traditional annual series build deep user relationships and realize monetization through long-term stickiness; AI manhua dramas achieve high-frequency user reach, mass production, rapid trial and error, and realize monetization through traffic sharing and advertising. The former has a deep moat but slow growth, while the latter develops fast but has low user loyalty.
AI solves the problem of "quantity". In this era of wild growth of AI, the screening of "quality" has just begun. In the first half of this year, 221,900 new AI dramas and manhua