Kadokawa Consolidates 5 Studios Into Studio One Base

Kadokawa is consolidating five anime production subsidiaries into a single new company called Studio One Base, launching in November 2026. The merger brings together ENGI, Studio KADAN, Chiptune, Bellnox Films, and Raging Bull under one roof—literally: the new studio will operate from Sunshine City in Ikebukuro, Tokyo.

The move is framed as a strategic play to strengthen anime production capacity, improve working conditions across the subsidiaries, and foster better collaboration between teams. Kadokawa will retain full ownership of Studio One Base, which is projected to employ approximately 310 people.

Here's the wrinkle: despite the merger, Kadokawa plans to keep the existing studio names and their individual creative identities intact. So you're not watching five studios dissolve into a homogeneous blob—it's more like five semi-autonomous units operating under shared infrastructure and leadership. That's either a smart way to preserve each studio's strengths or a half-measure that defeats the purpose of consolidation, depending on how the integration actually plays out.

The consolidation reflects a broader industry trend of vertical integration among major publishers. For Kadokawa, which already owns or operates multiple production houses, this is about efficiency: centralizing operations, pooling resources, and theoretically reducing the kind of scheduling conflicts and resource bottlenecks that plague anime production. Whether it actually improves working conditions—a stated goal—remains to be seen. The anime industry's labor practices are notoriously grueling, and structural reorganization alone rarely fixes that without serious investment in staffing and compensation.

Studio One Base becomes operational in November 2026, giving Kadokawa roughly two years to sort out the logistics. The significance here is less about any single studio and more about what it signals: major consolidation in anime production is accelerating, and the companies that can afford to merge and centralize are doing so. For creators and fans, that could mean more consistent output from a unified Kadokawa production wing—or it could mean less diversity in who gets to make anime at all.

Source: Anime Corner