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The original was posted on /r/onepunchman by /u/Evatog on 2025-12-21 21:02:01+00:00.
I keep seeing people talking about how little JC staff got for this season.
Thats not how things work in japan. They bid for the job but they dont bid with money, the term bid here I think has created a lot of misinterpretations. The use of bid here is almost synonymous with apply.
All anime get industry standard payment, which last time I saw it reported was ~2m USD around a decade ago. Every single-cour anime gets 2 million or whatever its inflated to today, with only rare exceptions. Heres kubo saying season 1 of OPM had a standard budget. (This was arguing vs someone saying it wasnt fair to compare seasons 1 and 2 because 2 only got a standard budget)
So why do some anime look absolutely incredible while others look like dogshit? Easy answer: Greed and quality of crew. Thats it.
The anime industry has expanded so much in the past years that a lot of people going into the industry dont even like anime, or animation, and instead are being driven into the industry via economic demand. This does not a sakuga animator make. Also people of similar skill and talent tend to prefer working with each other, that way their animation isnt "wasted" by being added to garbage. So studios end up congregating a certain quality of animator. JC staff is where a lot of the mediocre animators have chosen to congregate.
Then, most importantly, the studio is always looking to fill their coffers. Think about it. Season 1, 2, and 3 all got roughly the same budget. Difference is mad house spent the whole 2 million on the anime, and they did it intelligently by subcontracting a bunch of sakuga freelance animators. Id bet dollars to doughnuts JC staff spent like 1.75m on season 2 by putting a ton of their mediocre demand-hires on it, and it ended up kind of shit anyways and the studio only pocketed 250k so they decided fuck it for season 3 and only put 500k into the project, that way no matter what the studio gets to slap 1.5m into their coffers.
TLDR: No, JC wasnt given a half eaten bag of chips and 7 minutes to make season 3. They were selected for the contract and paid industry standard rate 2 years ago AFAIK.
JC staff chose to only allocate a small percentage of the industry standard payment to actually produce OPM S3.
JC staff chose to start production when they did.
