Consistently, a little over 10% of the total industry’s revenue is made by the studios. The reason for the difference in earnings has to do with the way anime is made.

By the time a studio puts pencil to paper, most of the decisions about the anime have already been made by a group of companies known as a “production committee.” Production committees usually include the original material’s publisher, the TV network the show will be broadcast on, merchandisers, distributors, and sometimes other companies such as Pizza Hut for Code Geass. This is true for most late-night anime (Which is the kind of anime most of us in the West care about.).

These companies invest money into the anime’s production, plan the anime, and then farm it out to a studio, providing them with a budget and marching orders to make the anime proper. The work anime studios do is work-for-hire on projects conceived by committee.

Some studios have enough clout to sit on their own production committees. Kyoto Animation is an example.

Other studios have close ties with production companies, which gives them added job security. Examples include Sunrise and A-1 Pictures, which are subsidiaries of Bandai Namco and Aniplex, respectively.

Other anime studios, however, are subject to the market, and must keep a constant stream of new work coming in to sustain themselves, in addition to keeping their costs low.

The biggest investors in a given anime make the most money off of it, and the studio hired to produce the show proper gets a share of some of the supplementary profits. This creates the huge gap between what the “industry” makes versus what the studios themselves make.

A simple solution would be to somehow funnel a larger share of the profits toward the studios, but because the genesis of most anime lies within the production committee structure, lessening the profit motive for these companies would only result in less anime being made, which would put animators out of work.