Anime’s presence in North America has evolved over the years, and we’ve come a long way from the days when “Japanimation” was just a morbid curiosity and guilty pleasure. The perceived fringe animation has grown into a genuinely enjoyable and thrilling source of content for Western audiences, and while anime has become much more popular with the mainstream over the past few years, the current content out there has hit new heights. Dragon Ball Super: Broly, the latest chapter in the ongoing Dragon Ball series, has made over $30 million domestically (with a global total of over $100 million), which makes it the third highest-grossing anime film of all-time in North America.

Dragon Ball Super: Broly has found very real success, but its numbers hold even more weight when it’s considered that the film didn’t even experience a true wide release. Funimation released the film to what would ultimately be 1267 theaters for a 23-day window, which is exceptional for an anime title, but it’s still about a quarter of the coverage that a blockbuster wide release sees. Despite these limitations, Dragon Ball Super: Broly still managed to domestically outperform 2017’s The Nut Job 2 and last year’s Early Man, both of which had traditional releases. Accordingly, it finally feels like anime titles such as Broly deserve wider releases because not only is anime arguably more popular and normalized at this point than even a decade ago, but there are now dedicated streaming services that can provide people with content and introduce newcomers to the form in a way that was never possible before.

Additionally, there are now more film distributors like Funimation, Fathom Events, and GKIDS, that all specialize in select anime releases. Anime has always felt like a fascination or oddity to mainstream audiences, but with the increased prevalence and encouraging box office numbers from recent titles, it’s perhaps time to take the medium even more seriously and treat its releases like any other animated feature.

While Dragon Ball Super: Broly’s success is prompting these current revaluations, it’s important to look at how Funimation’s past three Dragon Ball feature films have each been progressively popular. Subsequently, they’ve also each had slightly larger releases to take advantage of that fact. Whereas 2014’s Battle of Gods hit 692 theaters, 2015’s Resurrection ‘F’ increased to 913, and this year’s Dragon Ball Super: Broly has expanded to 1267 theaters. But these numbers could of course be higher. The growth and demand for these films grows at a shocking rate. For instance, Dragon Ball Super: Broly’s opening weekend gross of nearly $10 million was higher than the entire $8 million North American run of Resurrection ‘F,’ which in itself was a milestone by 2015 standards.