Sony has made a brilliant pivot into anime production via Crunchyroll and feature animation via Spider-Verse .

As of 2026, the landscape is shifting again. Studios are reeling from the "Streaming Wars" hangover, cutting costs, and licensing their old content back to rivals.

This shift forced legacy studios to pivot. Suddenly, productions were no longer judged solely by their theatrical performance but by their ability to populate a library on a proprietary streaming service. Disney+, Max (Warner Bros.), and Peacock (Universal) became the new battlegrounds. This changed the nature of "popular productions." A movie like The Irishman or Roma became a "popular" event not because millions bought tickets, but because it dominated the cultural conversation for a weekend on a platform accessible in hundreds of millions of homes.

(now part of Comcast/Universal) and Illumination have carved out massive market shares. Illumination, in particular, with the Despicable Me and Mario franchises, has championed a production model focused on commercial efficiency and broad, visual comedy that translates easily across borders.

The result has been a content arms race. Billions of dollars are poured into productions annually. This has been a boom for production crews and visual effects (VFX) houses, though it has also led to a saturation of the market, making it harder for any single title to become a true "watercooler" hit.

While film gets the headlines, serialized storytelling has been revolutionized by cable and basic cable studios.

These legendary studios lead the market in both box office revenue and theatrical distribution.