Studio Ghibli Fest has been running for a decade, and its theatrical revivals keep pulling longtime fans and new generations into cinemas across the U.S., where a family tradition built around My Neighbor Totoro now plays out in matching Totoro jammies. Amanda Mendoza VanCleave, 34, says she circles the dates whenever the calendar comes out because the festival has become a special ritual for her, her 3-year-old daughter and her mother, Araceli. They found the films on HBO Max, but the theater in Austin, Texas, became the place where the ritual stuck. Small bodies, big screens, and a corporate release schedule. That’s the setup.
VanCleave said her daughter screams “Totoro!” when she sees the opening Totoro logo. The theater laughs. VanCleave apologizes. The scene is cute, sure, but it also shows how these films have been folded into a repeatable event, one that turns a studio catalog into a managed public gathering. The festival has featured My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and Ponyo, among others, and the screenings now function less like one-off revivals than like a scheduled circuit for families, fans and children being introduced to the same titles again and again.
A Catalog Turned Into a Nationwide Product
GKids and Fathom Entertainment launched Studio Ghibli Fest in 2017 with five titles that accounted for $5 million in ticket sales. Dave Jesteadt, GKids president, said, “I’d be lying if I thought the program when we conceived it would be going as long as it has,” and added, “It does defy conventional wisdom. We keep waiting for the year that people tire of going to the films, but that’s not what’s happening. Every single year, we see records being set. The grosses are going up, not down.” The biggest box-office year was 2024, when 14 movies accounted for $16.4 million in sales. Last year, eight movies grossed $10.6 million. This year, both Ponyo and My Neighbor Totoro have already played for popular five-day stints.
Shannah Miller, vice president of marketing for Fathom, said the theatrical footprint has expanded from about 640 locations when the festival started to more than 1,100 locations this year. She said the festival began with two or three playdates for a title, but fan demand has led to five-day runs for some films. That’s the language of expansion, but it’s also the language of distribution discipline: a catalog, a rollout, a footprint, a market. The films aren’t just being loved. They’re being moved.
When GKids first got the Ghibli library in 2011, the Japanese studio stressed how important theatrical releases were to it. GKids first hosted retrospectives, mostly in major markets and arthouses, before moving the films into multiplexes where a new generation of children might encounter them. Jesteadt said, “One of the worst things that can happen to classics is that they’re perceived as classics and kept in amber.” He said, “We wanted to move to a nationwide celebration that really treated these as equivalent to any new Hollywood film.”
The Theater as Marketplace
Jesteadt also said that when GKids introduced the catalog to streaming in 2020 for the first time, “we thought, ‘OK, surely, this is maybe the moment,’” but “if anything, that just brought in a new audience that wanted to see these films in theaters for the first time.” The streaming platform didn’t replace the theater. It fed it. The home screen became another feeder line into the box office, and the old promise of convenience ended up sending people back to the multiplex.
This year’s festival continues with Tales of Earthsea on Aug. 8 and 10, Only Yesterday on Aug. 9 and 11, the 40th anniversary of the first Ghibli release, 1986’s Castle in the Sky, on Aug. 22-26, a 4K remastered Princess Mononoke on Sept. 26-30 and a 25th anniversary for Spirited Away on Oct. 17-21. The festival remains a strictly U.S.-based phenomenon, though some of the films are revived in other countries. Miller said, “We are equally in awe of and proud of what we’re building and the opportunity to celebrate instead of all the doom and gloom, ‘Is theater dead?’ conversations.” She added, “We have a different story to tell with Studio Ghibli.”
The story is simple enough. A studio library becomes a recurring event. A recurring event becomes a national footprint. A national footprint becomes a sales story. The language stays warm and family-friendly, but the machinery underneath is all scheduling, expansion and revenue.
The Academy Museum is hosting a new Ponyo exhibit, and composer Joe Hisaishi is touring the music of many of the films, including a seven-night residency at New York’s Radio City Music Hall in August. Angela Lector, 27, said she has attended Howl’s Moving Castle dressed as its hero, Sophie, and met Japanese film students at a showing of Princess Mononoke, a favorite from when she was a kid. “Being in the theater is so much more fun than being on HBO Max,” Lector said. “Being in your home, you can make your own popcorn and cuddle up with your dog. But being in the theater you can actually talk to people you don’t know about the movie.”
Shared Screens, Managed Crowds
Lector said she’d like to see 1984’s pre-Ghibli Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind brought back. “The Ghibli films are timeless. There’s something for everyone in them,” she said. “Everything feels human. No one is too powerful or too small.” VanCleave said she recently noticed a classmate of her daughter’s wearing a bow like Kiki’s. “I saw her mom and asked about it. We got to talking, and she also had watched Ghibli movies at home,” VanCleave said. “So, we invited her to ‘Ponyo,’ and it was her first movie theater experience. It was cute. The two 3-year-olds shared a recliner.”
That’s the final image here: a shared recliner, a child’s first theater trip, and a festival that has turned nostalgia into a durable business model. The films may feel human to the people watching them. The apparatus around them is something else entirely.