Studio Mir, the KOSDAQ-listed Korean animation studio, is producing Netflix’s “Devil May Cry” anime as lead production company — involved from the scripting stage rather than brought on purely for animation work — adapting Capcom’s long-running action game franchise into an eight-episode series. Within days of its release, the show climbed to No. 2 on Netflix’s global TV show rankings, the only animated title in the global Top 5 at the time and a rare instance of a Korean-made anime charting that high internationally, according to industry reporting on its release-week performance.
Netflix confirmed a second season on April 11, 2025, with Studio Mir framing the renewal explicitly around sustaining the show’s international momentum rather than treating Season 1 as a self-contained hit. The studio has continued building out its Netflix relationship since: it has also been developing a new original concept, “Cozy,” alongside its work on licensed IP like “Devil May Cry,” suggesting the studio is using game-adaptation success as leverage to get original Korean-developed concepts in front of the same global platform.
The arrangement reflects a deliberate trade Korean animation studios have been making with Netflix industry-wide: the platform typically funds full production costs plus a margin (commonly cited around 10 percent) in exchange for taking all rights to the finished work, a structure Korean studios have broadly accepted because Korea, unlike Japan, never built a large domestic TV-anime market of its own — making Netflix’s upfront funding, even at the cost of IP ownership, the more viable path to reaching a global audience at all.
Source: Asia Economy, Newspim, and industry trade reporting, 2023-2025.
