Rei set the box office analysis aside and turned his attention to what came next.

The post-spring-holiday planning covered two areas simultaneously: the work schedules for both companies across the coming months, and the ongoing relationship with Hoshimori Group around the manga serialisation.

The decision to release the three Infinity Castle arc films across five years rather than compressing them into a shorter window had extended the Demon Slayer IP's active commercial lifecycle to six or seven years.

Across that period, the property would function as a sustained revenue generator for Shirogane Animation, providing the kind of continuous stable income that most IP portfolios could only produce during their initial launch period.

This was the model, and it was a good model. But it had structural limits that Rei was honest with himself about.

He had, in his previous life, watched Disney operate at a different scale entirely. The Mickey Mouse IP, which had existed for the better part of a century, was still generating billions of dollars annually for the company without requiring any new creative output. The IP had achieved a longevity that made the concept of a lifecycle almost irrelevant.

Japanese manga properties did not work this way. The commercial peak was tied to the active serialisation period and the years immediately following conclusion.

Once a work finished, the revenue curve dropped significantly and kept dropping. The model was fundamentally different from the American comics approach, and attempting to import the American approach would not work: the cultural resonance, the global industrial infrastructure, the distribution channels that made American entertainment culture operate as it did in his previous life did not exist in this world's Japan in the same form.

Demon Slayer would make a great deal of money across six or seven years. Then it would settle into the revenue pattern of a concluded work. This was the honest projection.

What it meant operationally was that the next major property needed to be in production. And it was.

Rei looked at the stack of Attack on Titan original manga manuscripts sitting beside his desk.

He had been drawing consistently throughout the release period, taking whatever time was not consumed by promotional obligations and converting it into pages.

The backlog had accumulated to more than a dozen chapters, held in reserve specifically for the launch alongside the anime broadcast in April.

The coordination with Hoshimori Group's serialisation schedule was already underway.

Attack on Titan was a different kind of property from Demon Slayer. Its critical reputation, at least through the point in the story where the material was still doing what it was designed to do, significantly exceeded Demon Slayer's.

The storytelling ambition was higher. The thematic complexity was higher. The emotional demands it placed on its audience were different in kind rather than degree.

The commercial ceiling was lower. Rei was clear-eyed about this. The property's depth was part of what limited its broadest possible reach. A seven-year-old child could follow Demon Slayer. Attack on Titan was not designed for that audience.

But reputation, critical standing, and the specific kind of devoted audience that formed around work that asked more of them: these had their own commercial value, and Attack on Titan at its best was the kind of work that produced that audience.

The qualification was the ending.

In his previous life, the final arc of Attack on Titan had done damage to the work's legacy that the preceding chapters had spent years building.

Eren's characterisation in the concluding sections had moved in a direction that made him difficult to defend coherently. Specific plot decisions, the manipulation of titans to ensure historical outcomes, including acts that were repulsive when examined directly, had produced a backlash from an audience that had been fully invested until that point.

The dialogue about Mikasa in the final chapters was not something Rei was prepared to include in any version. The specific quality of emotional immaturity it displayed in a character the series had spent years developing was simply not going to appear in this version.

Armin's characterisation in the later chapters had its own problems distinct from Eren's.

The moment Annie emerged from her crystal encasement, Armin's accumulated anger toward her, built across years of conflict and loss, dissolved almost immediately in favour of a romantic attachment that the story had not earned and that sat badly against everything the preceding chapters had established about who he was.

The sequence of events that followed, a commander of his standing making decisions compromised by that attachment at critical moments, had produced a specific category of fan frustration: not grief over a character's death, but contempt for a character's diminishment. That was a different and worse response to generate.

The fix was not complicated. Armin was an exceptional character through most of the story. Making him behave like an exceptional character in the final arc rather than a lovestruck one was not a fundamental structural change. It was a matter of writing him consistently.

The broader question Rei was turning over was how much of the original ending's problems were structural and how much were cosmetic.

The honest answer was that most of them were cosmetic.

The bones of Attack on Titan's conclusion were sound. The protagonist who had become the villain in the eyes of the world. The sacrifice that bore the weight of everyone's hatred to purchase a temporary peace.

The specific loneliness of choosing to be the person who makes an impossible choice so that others do not have to. These were not bad ideas. They were, in fact, compelling ideas.

The original execution had undermined them through excess. Too many plot points added in the final stretch to increase weight, each one independently defensible but collectively tipping the balance past tragedy into something that read as the author punishing the audience for caring.

Eren manipulating a titan to consume his own mother to preserve a timeline was the clearest example: the idea of Eren's foreknowledge producing this horrifying loop was genuinely dark and interesting, but presenting it without sufficient emotional processing time turned a tragic revelation into a revolting one.

Improvise those specific points. Streamline the final arc's pacing. Write Armin as Armin rather than as a romantic comedy secondary lead. Keep the essential shape of the ending intact.

What remained was not a compromised version of a great story. It was the great story, cleaned of the decisions that had obscured it. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

There was also the question of the ending's resemblance to Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion's Zero Requiem.

In his previous life, this comparison had been made immediately and loudly by a significant portion of the fandom, and the resemblance was close enough that dismissing the comparison was difficult.

The protagonist taking on the world's hatred, orchestrating his own death at the hands of someone close to him, sacrificing himself to bring peace: the structural parallel was apparent to anyone familiar with both works.

In this Japan, Code Geass did not exist. The Zero Requiem did not exist as a cultural reference point.

The ending where the protagonist bears the world's hatred and is killed to purchase a temporary peace for the people he loves would arrive as genuinely original.

It would be read as Shirogane-sensei's own creative invention rather than as a hesitant approximation of something already done better elsewhere. It would be praised for its structural boldness rather than criticised for its structural familiarity.

Rei felt something close to amusement at the specific logic of this.

The largest advantage of his situation was not the ability to reproduce exceptional work. Any competent person with full foreknowledge of a story's plot could reproduce its surface. The advantage was the ability to reproduce exceptional work while knowing precisely which decisions had undermined it in its original context and correcting those decisions before they were made.

The result was not a copy. It was the version the original should have been.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Infinity Castle Arc was already demonstrating this principle. The flashback pacing problems that had been the dominant critical complaint about the original film in his previous life were not present in the Japan version because Rei had known they were coming and had addressed them at the script stage.

The audience had not complained about pacing because there was no pacing problem to complain about.

Attack on Titan would follow the same logic. The specific controversial moments that had diminished the original in retrospect were already identified.

They would simply not be in the Japan version. What would remain was everything that had made people love the work before the final chapters arrived.

"Once the Demon Slayer theatrical release period is finished, the focus shifts to Attack on Titan and Your Name."

He wrote this at the top of the planning document.

Below it: Summer Time Rendering. Higurashi: When They Cry. The game adaptation project.

Five simultaneous works at various stages of production. The Attack on Titan manga serialisation launching in conjunction with the anime broadcast in April. The Your Name theatrical release targeting the summer window. The remaining three properties developing at the pace the available production teams could sustain.

He sat with the schedule for a moment and then began working through the specific sequencing, assigning priorities and identifying the decision points in each property's development that would require his direct involvement versus what could be delegated to the production teams.