Expect Demon Slayer to get name-dropped at the newly announced SXSW 2026 panel The Anime Advantage: Brand Strategy Meets Cultural Power panel in March, featuring reps from Crunchyroll, Twitch, and Major League Baseball Credit: Crunchyroll

Are you getting tired of everyone in the film industry acting confused when an anime film tops the box office? With the runaway smash of Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc coming so soon after similar defiance of conventional wisdom for Demon Slayer (and before that One Piece, and before that Dragon Ball, and before that Pokémon, and before that…), South by Southwest has just announced a panel tackling the transmedia success of anime in the market place.

The Anime Advantage: Brand Strategy Meets Cultural Power, featuring Darren Traub and Elizabeth Cohen from Crunchyroll, Robin Tilotta from Twitch, and Uzma Rawn Dowler from Major League Baseball, is just one of 250 panels, selected through PanelPicker community voting, added to the lineup for the 2026 festival (March 12-18). The convention had already announced 50 panels, as well as the event’s new format for its first years without the convention center. With this lineup boost, inevitably AI makes a showing, but it’s not all venture capital pitch sessions and blithe optimism about LLMs:

  • Physicist Anthony Aguirre and tech ethicist Tristan Harris get beyond the hype and the headlines to explore the real threats of artificial intelligence in How We Could Lose Control: Avoiding the Paths to Runaway AI as they discuss whether it’s too late to add guardrails.
  • On a more positive note, Psyonic CEO and founder Aadeel Akhtar discusses how AI-assisted cybernetics and prosthetics are changing lives in The AI-Powered Bionic Revolution Has Already Begun.
  • TikTok celebrity Jordan Howlett, aka Jordan the Stallion, discusses his career, collaborations with mainstream stars like Donald Glover and Michael B. Jordan, and the nature of influencer culture in An Influential Conversation with Jordan “The Stallion.”
  • Launching a New WNBA Team: The Story of the Toronto Tempo gets into the international expansion of the WNBA  with the figures behind the league’s first Canadian franchise, CMO Whitney Bell, and CRO Lisa Ferkul, in conversation with Matt Klar of branding agency The Greater.

SXSW and SXSW EDU 2026 badges, and the full list of announced panels, are available now via sxsw.com. Keep up with all our SXSW news, reviews, announcements and interviews at austinchronicle.com/sxsw.

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The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.