Attack on Titan Opening Clip Smashes Past 10 Million Views in One Weekend

A clip of Attack on Titan's new opening sequence managed to rack up 10 million views in the three days since it was uploaded.

The Final Season - Part 2's new opening animation was uploaded to Youtube on Jan. 9, the same day that the second half of the last season premiered its first episode. Since then, the video has pulled in multiple millions of views each day, and is now currently sitting at 10.8 million views. The official Attack on Titan Twitter account posted a new image and a multilingual message thanking fans for making the clip a success.

The anime's latest  opening title sequence is set to the song "The Rumbling," by Japanese metal group SiM. Gamers may recognize the group's music, as their songs were previously featured in a number of popular titles, including Mobile Suit Gundam Extreme VS. Maxi Boost ON and Yakuza Kiwami 2.

The video's performance on YouTube is just the latest demonstration of Attack on Titan's continued popularity. On Jan. 9, demand for the new episode of the series was enough to temporarily crash popular anime streaming service Crunchyroll. Crunchyroll is simulcasting the series with subtitles in eight languages to over 200 countries globally, but the final season is also being streamed on Funimation and Hulu as well.

While the original Attack on Titan manga's finale was met with a very mixed reception when it was published in 2021, it is now clear that the series' controversial ending hasn't put a damper on the hype for the anime adaptation's climax. The series was created by author Hajime Isayama in 2009 and was published by Kodansha after Japan's most popular manga publication, Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump, infamously rejected Isayama's pitch. The series is now the 15th best-selling manga series of all time, with over 100 million copies in circulation worldwide.

An anime adaptation of Isayama's work debuted in 2014, and was originally produced by Wit Studio, the animation company behind Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress and last fall's critical darling, Ranking of Kings. Wit Studio animated the first three seasons of the series but was unexpectedly replaced by MAPPA, the studio behind Jujutsu Kaisen anime and the upcoming Chainsaw Man series, for its fourth and final season. While MAPPA's run on the series has been widely criticized for not looking as good as Wit Studio's seasons, the shift has clearly not affected the anime's popularity.

New episodes of Attack on Titan: The Final Season - Part 2 will be released every Sunday on Crunchyroll, Funimation and Hulu until the series' conclusion. The complete manga series is now available in English from Kodansha USA.

Source: YouTube, Twitter