Tokyo’s TIFFCOM is rebuilding itself as a global market for anime, IP and AI
TIFFCOM is expanding its Tokyo IP Market and adding anime and AI sessions for 2026. The story is not the conference calendar. Japan wants to export adaptable story worlds, and Tokyo is trying to become where those rights get packaged for global buyers.
Mina Park
Tokyo wants to sell the next life of a Japanese story, not only the finished cut that just screened.
That is the quieter bet inside TIFFCOM’s 2026 plan. The market is expanding its Tokyo IP Market and adding anime and AI sessions, but the session count is surface. Underneath is a product shift: manga, novels, remakes, and anime-adjacent story worlds packaged for global buyers as seriously as finished films once were.
Our read: TIFFCOM wants to become a packaging desk for studios and streamers, not only a booth hall for completed titles. Anime, AI, and the Cannes test this spring all point the same direction.
What TIFFCOM is
TIFFCOM is Asia’s leading audiovisual content market affiliated with the Tokyo International Film Festival. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, and Unijapan, Japan’s film-promotion body, organize it jointly.
The 23rd edition runs Oct. 28 to 30, 2026, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Trade Center Hamamatsucho-kan. It sits alongside the 39th TIFF, set for Oct. 26 to Nov. 4 across Hibiya, Yurakucho, Marunouchi, and Ginza.
In 2025 the market drew more than 4,600 industry professionals from 46 countries and regions, with more than 7,700 business meetings logged. This is the commerce wing of Tokyo’s festival week: buyers, producers, rights holders, and the people who actually move titles across borders.
What 2026 is adding
The headline change is an expanded Tokyo IP Market: Adaptation & Remake. The program covers manga and novel adaptation rights plus remake rights for film and television projects.
The conference slate grows to about 20 sessions on Japanese IP’s overseas growth, an anime industry report, AI, and international business ties, with particular attention to Asian markets.
The Tokyo Gap-Financing Market returns for a seventh edition with roughly 20 selected feature projects. It is backed by a co-production partnership with Frontières, the Fantasia International Film Festival’s project market in Canada.
Shiina Yasushi, Unijapan’s executive adviser and TIFFCOM’s CEO, framed the demand plainly: global appetite for Japanese content was already obvious. Managing director Ikeda Kaori is selling the three days as trade, insight, and networking in one compressed window.
Why anime needs a different market
Traditional film markets are built to sell a finished object. A cut, a territory, a window.
Anime rarely works that cleanly. Most titles are financed and owned through production committees, so streaming, merchandise, music, and derivative rights can sit with different partners. Merchandising and licensing often out-earn the streaming deal that fans treat as the whole business.
That is why a dedicated IP desk matters. Buyers are not only shopping episodes. They are shopping the right to adapt, remake, localize, and extend a story world without walking into a rights maze after the handshake.
Finished titles vs. IP ecosystems
Selling a finished film is a one-time territory sale. Licensing an IP ecosystem is a longer contract about what else the property can become.
Manga-to-screen options, remake rights, game tie-ins, and character licensing all travel differently from a single completed cut. Global platforms want supply. Publishers want to keep pieces of the franchise. Committees want to protect Japanese windows.
The market that can host that negotiation with Japanese rights holders in the room has a real product. TIFFCOM’s rebrand from story pitching toward adaptation and remake is the institutional version of that change. Finished titles still matter. The higher-margin future is the story that can be remade, extended, and sold again.
The Cannes test
The expansion follows TIFFCOM’s first Japan IP Market at the Marché du Film in Cannes this May, co-organized with the Cannes market as part of Japan’s Country of Honour program. More than 700 people registered for pitches and panels. Organizers reported more than 80 targeted one-on-one meetings.
Seven Japanese IP holders brought book-to-screen and remake catalogs, including Kadokawa, Shochiku, Toei, and Nippon Animation. The keynote featured Tetsu Fujimura, executive producer of Netflix’s live-action One Piece. Panels put Crunchyroll and French publisher Glénat on the same stage as remake case studies like TF1’s French live-action Cat’s Eyes.
Cannes was the proof of concept abroad. Tokyo in October is the home-court version, with more inventory and more time for meetings that actually close.
Where AI fits
The AI sessions are not a novelty panel bolted onto the brochure. They sit next to anime and IP because the friction in Japanese content export is often speed and clarity: localization timelines, rights fragmentation, and the cost of moving a title into many languages before pirates do it first.
Japan’s industrial ministries are already treating generative tools as part of the overseas-promotion toolkit, including translation capacity for manga and anime. At a market, that conversation lands as production support, localization workflow, and rights hygiene, not as sci-fi distraction.
Our take: AI will not invent Japan’s next hit IP. It may decide which rights packages move fast enough to matter.
Can Tokyo compete?
Hong Kong FILMART remains Asia’s largest general content bazaar. Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market sells itself as the region’s story-and-tech hub beside BIFF. MIPCOM and the American Film Market still set the global TV and film sales calendar. Cannes’ Marché remains the prestige room.
TIFFCOM’s wager is narrower and sharper. It cannot out-scale FILMART on booth count. It can own the Japanese IP lane: anime, manga adaptation, remakes, and the committee-era rights conversations buyers keep getting wrong when they treat Japan like a single-studio Hollywood catalog.
Whether that works depends on October. Watch whether the Tokyo IP Market fills with serious acquisition teams, whether anime-specific sessions draw platforms rather than tourists with badges, and whether AI talk turns into deal language instead of keynote fog.
Our verdict
TIFFCOM is rebuilding itself as a global market for anime, IP, and the tools that move them. The conference add-ons are the surface. The deeper move is Japan’s soft-power export model shifting from finished reels to adaptable story worlds.
If Tokyo can make Hamamatsucho the place where those rights are packaged cleanly, it does not need to win every market on the calendar. It only needs to win the lane that decides which Japanese characters, titles, and remakes get a second life abroad.
