Hello everyone, welcome to another Definitive Anime Review. Wait…do you smell burning? No, it’s not because you left your pizza too long in the oven again. It’s actually because the largest anime licensing company is currently on fire…metaphorically speaking…and not in a good way either!
It’s been a while since I’ve given Crunchyroll a good ol’ roasting (probably the last thing it needs considering I just said it was on fire), in fact the last time I did, they thought it was funny and gave me a couple months of free Crunchyroll Premium or whatever it’s called nowadays. It’s not my fault if the few remaining organic life forms remaining at the company think I’m funny!
What I am to do in this article is respond to this silly puff piece written in Variety. Obviously, no insults made to the people that have their names attached to this article, it’s very obvious that Crunchyroll’s hitmen have surrounded Variety’s offices and have threatened to steal all of their cheesecake in the office fridges, so I will cut them some slack!
So without any futher delay, let’s get to the bottom of this mystery and maybe have a laugh or two along the way.
Two Decades of Business
The Variety article starts by saying explaining that Crunchyroll has built its business on anime for the last two decades. I personally think it’s very important for every single article regarding Crunchyroll to give a nice brief explanation of its origins. You know, for all the younger folks out that have only watched Solo Leveling.
Crunchyroll is a company that got its start as a pirate anime streaming website in 2006. It offered all sorts of shows, just like its various descendants such as KissAnime, 9anime and the various copycats that have appeared over the years. Crunchyroll was a bit different however to those sites as it had something known as the Crunchyroll Library, which held information about the different shows it had on the site and gave suggestions to people depending on what anime they entered in.
The website also offered streaming of tokusatsu as well, such as BBC’s Top Gear, featuring the masked hero known as The Stig with his allies Clarkson, Hammond and May to defeat the Gorgom Empire and put celebrities in a reasonably priced car.
Eventually, Crunchyroll slowly became a legitimate website, by acquiring licenses to stream anime in 2009, notably Naruto Shippuden. It was the start of Crunchyroll’s move towards being a legitimate website, purging it of its past as a pirate site. The Crunchyroll Library, old logo and all, lasted right up until Crunchyroll redesigned their website a couple of years ago. Bit of a shame, you could still see the page advertising anime raws right up until its closure!
So no, Variety. While Crunchyroll has been around for two decades. It was engaging in piracy for the first three of them. Though let’s face it, they probably had their best anime selection on the site for those first three years, so it’s quite a big loss to be honest.
“We want to be everything for someone”
Scott Donaton, Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Community made this quote to describe Crunchyroll:
We like to say that we don’t want to be something for everyone. We want to be everything to someone, and that’s the anime fan. That means whether they’re streaming it, whether they’re going to a theater to watch it, whether they’re gathering with their friends at a con or a festival, buying merchandise, games, digital manga. So really, we think of it as the full experience of serving anime fans across every platform. – Scott Donaton
Now Mr. Donaton, thank you for being the VP of Community. Might be a bit too late considering the series ended in 2015 but you do you I guess. One thing I will say though, I think this quote is very misguided considering Crunchyroll’s recent strategy of not being “everything to the anime fan”.
We need to talk about the recent news of Crunchyroll’s continued gutting of its physical media offerings. Sony, who own Crunchyroll, have had a bit of a thing recently of dismissing the importance of physical media. While I do like watching the odd episode of Detective Conan out of order on Netflix or watching the latest episode of Star Detective Precure, nothing beats having a copy of an anime on your shelf! I’m a big fan of physical media and I’m pretty proud of having a lovely big collection of retro games along with my small collection of anime Blu-rays. The fact that I actually own Looking for Magical Doremi and that it sits there on my shelf ready for me to pop it on whenever I want fills me with so much joy you have no idea!
So when Mr. Donaton says they want to be “everything to the anime fan”, it confuses me when we see decisions such as Crunchyroll locking their physical store behind a premium subscription tier. Stopping parts of their paying audience from accessing physical media. Though they recently went even further by gutting the store of several categories, including all books and several categories of Blu-rays and DVDs.
Perhaps when they say they wish to be “everything to the anime fan” they meant doing a hostile takeover of a beloved US physical media store front in Right Stuf and slowly suck the soul out of it. Perhaps Mr. Donaton also meant that being “everything to the anime fan” was to sell exclusive Demon Slayer desktop fans? I mean, Crunchyroll did announce in July that they were going to have “collectables, curated drops and limited release products” so maybe a Demon Slayer desktop fan would come under that? Who knows.
“Any opportunity we have to connect in person with the fan base is important.”
Crunchyroll appear at conventions! I can actually go up to Crunchyroll myself at MCM London and say hi to them and tell them to put Jewelpet Kira Deco on their service! Well, not quite. I could go up to Crunchyroll’s booth at MCM London and tell them to put Manabi Straight up for streaming but that doesn’t mean they’re going to listen to me, or even know what a Jewelpet or a Manabi Straight even is.
Thankfully the average Magical Stage reader knows what both of those shows are. You’re all so great!
But if you do go to a Crunchyroll stall at one of these cons, they’ll be selling you their physical media (shocker), trying to get you to get a premium membership and maybe giving you a nice free tote bag. I’ve got two of those! Very handy for the Lidl shopping. When you’re the largest anime streaming service and you’ve got less presence than say Bandai Namco or even All The Anime (the UK’s biggest local physical distributor) then it’s really showing how little presence they have here in my opinion.
Mr. Donaton says this in regards to their physical events:
Any opportunity we have to connect in person with the fan base is important. – Scott Donaton
Now I don’t know about you, but renting out that place near Tottenham Court Road Station that I like to call “Pickpocket Central” to have a big “interactive” thing with anime on it for a few weeks in May is not my idea of connecting with anime fans. Unless you mean having some bloke connecting with the wallet in my pocket and then doing a runner, then sure!
Now the UK is pretty bad for this but the US, Crunchyroll’s home turf, isn’t faring much better. While CR have far more going on there, they’re sticking to either the largest cons such as Anime Expo in Los Angeles or AnimeNYC, which they’ve kinda made into their home ground after Crunchyroll Expo mysteriously disappeared.
Remember Crunchyroll Expo? The con that was run by Crunchyroll themselves? The con that was designed specifically for them to connect directly with fans in the US entirely on their own terms. Yeah, that hasn’t happened for four years now. It went on hiatus in 2022 and nothing has popped up about it since. Maybe Crunchyroll are OK with the presence they have at cons right now? On their website, they only list cons and events happening in North America (California and New York is the entirety of North America apparently) and nowhere else. Even the photos section only goes up to 2024 for some reason!
“A seat saved at the table for the fan”
Mr. Donaton continues in the article by saying:
At almost every meeting, we keep a seat saved at the table for the fan.
That literally means bringing in fan sentiment, watching fan sentiment, talking to them all the time. The beauty of the anime fan is they care so deeply. They love anime so much that they don’t hesitate to share their points of view on what they want to see more of, what they want you to do less of. I think that constant ‘fan first’ mentality of listening and understanding and creating the greatest experiences we can for them is what drives us every day. – Scott Donaton
Of course, Crunchyroll’s head office is like entering Valhalla itself for any anime fan. I still remember the remodelling pictures that they released which got people very upset because it was around the time people were finding out they paid their subtitling teams peanuts.
Not actual peanuts, mind you. We weren’t seeing Crunchyroll’s middle management heading down to their local Five Guys raiding the free peanuts to give to their employees!
But do we as anime fans have a seat at the table of Crunchyroll’s decision making? Did we ever have the ear of Crunchyroll-hime? Well…we might have done a long time ago, but I don’t think we do anymore and I think one of those isn’t necessarily Crunchyroll’s fault to be honest.
There is the opinion that Precure ended up on Crunchyroll, not because some bright spark at Crunchyroll was like “Wow, I really like that Precure anime! Maybe it’d get younger audiences to watch the service.” it was more like “Wow, these nutters on Twitter won’t stop going on at us every day to put Precure on Crunchyroll. If it’s on there, maybe they’d shut up for once.” It’s likely a mixture of the two to be fair. Though I will say we were very annoying about having Precure on Crunchyroll for many years. Miles, if you’re reading this, sorry for all that!
The thing is, it felt like we were listened to six years ago and I don’t think that’s remotely the case now where you’ve got Crunchyroll making anti-consumer decisions and leaving many anime fans in the lurch. Part of the problem is the fragmentation of social media that we’ve seen nowadays, which has only gotten worse with Twitter’s degradation under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Discounting the stuff outside of Crunchyroll’s control, are we really being offered a seat at the table? If they watch fan sentiment, then why do the decision makers working at this company routinely ignore the sentiment of fans? If the beauty of an anime fan is that they don’t mince words and that they will tell you exactly what they want then why do the opposite of what anime fans want?
I mean, the answer’s pretty obvious. There’s obviously something driving the decisions at Crunchyroll that are far more persuasive than the thoughts of their customers and that’s money.
Is it time for you to post that one screencap of Lickboot again?
Yes.
So how is Crunchyroll “listening to the fans”?
Excellent question! Let’s take a look at some of the exciting initiatives explained by the article, shall we?
While streaming is still the dominant platform for anime lovers, Crunchyroll’s theatrical arms saw great success in 2025 with “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — Infinity Castle,” taking in $136 million domestically. The film grossed $793 million worldwide.
Infinity Castle made loadsamoney so of course Crunchyroll is very happy with that result. So will Aniplex actually because they were on the production committee! Wait a minute…aren’t both of them owned by Sony? Wait, hold on a second!
Now, they’re reteaming with heralded Japanese anime director Makoto Shinkai (“Suzume”) on his latest, yet to be titled, feature. Crunchyroll has taken worldwide rights, excluding Asia but including India, and will distribute with Sony Pictures. In 2023, “Suzume” took in some $10 million at the North American box office.
See this one was very funny because Crunchyroll had decided to announce they were distributing the film worldwide before there was any announcement of what the film even is leading to Makoto Shinkai and Comix Wave Films commenting on it. Maybe Crunchyroll had nothing better to announce and they were like “well, better announce we have that Shinkai film that’s he’s directing that nobody knows the name of or what it looks like yet.”
They also recently announced they’re partnering with Sony Music-owned Aniplex on a new theatrical anime film “Solo Leveling: Beyond the System,” based on the popular Korean novel and webtoon series. The film is now in production.
Yes, because it’s very easy to partner with yourselves when releasing a new anime film right? As mentioned before, Aniplex and Crunchyroll are both part of Sony, in fact Aniplex even own part of Crunchyroll which is also part owned by Sony Pictures which is part of Sony. Did you know that Solo Leveling: Beyond the System is being produced at A-1 Pictures which is totally not part of…wait…you’re joking. A-1 Pictures is also part of Sony!? Next thing you’ll tell me PlayStation is part of Sony!
build note: I never realised that the word “Levelling” in “Solo Leveling” is spelt strangely. Turns out, US folks spell “Levelling” without the double l. What else are you lot hiding on the other side of the pond?
Oh no, they’re about to talk about technology.
I love technology…usually. When I’m not spending money on plushies of my favourite characters, I’m actually spending the money on buying new technology that is cool! Though these days, technology is also in the grips of an evil that plots to make everything expensive or absolutely stupid.
Now if you’re one of those losers that is a big fan of Generative AI, please close the page now. I think it’s the most useless, feckless and idiotic “technologies” ever devised. It’s not only anti-art, it’s also just really bad at its job. It can’t do anything right and every time I’ve attempted to use it to “make my life easier” it actually makes things worse and I have to spend double the time to fix the problems it has caused. The pursuit of “better” Generative AI has also caused critical components to phones, video game consoles and computers to become stupidly expensive because some doughnuts thought it was a great idea to invest all of their money and resources into this snake oil that aims to put people out of jobs and diminish artistic expression.
So needless to say, I’m not a very big fan of Generative AI. Even at the best of times!
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s have a look at what Mr. Donaton has to say about Crunchyroll and technology.
“We’re always looking at ways that new technologies and new formats can better serve our fans and to tell stories. There are certainly things that we’ll explore. I think it’s — to some degree — no different from figuring out our presence on TikTok and YouTube; what do fans expect and what are they consuming and loving in each medium and each platform? If we think we have something that we can offer there that will serve that fandom, we will be there.” – Scott Donaton
Now this is very much some marketing rubbish but if we break it down. What “new formats” even are there for Crunchyroll going to get into? They’re already in our cinemas, our phones, our PCs, our video game consoles and our smart fridges. What more is there? Am I going to watch Crunchyroll inside my toilet bowl? Maybe I can catch some anime on a vacuum cleaner?
Though when you see “new technologies” in something, it’s a euphemism for “Generative AI” because they know that their fans will immediately get very cross with them. I don’t think I have to get some polling company or do a survey to work out that many anime fans also do not like Generative AI either. Crunchyroll has in the past talked about exploring the use of Generative AI for their subtitling but have since walked back these comments in recent months though that doesn’t mean I’m going to think they’re not going to turn around and start using it in stuff.
Is Crunchyroll really burning?
Well, not literally. I wouldn’t say it is anywhere near as “good” as it used to be. But while the higher ups at the company enjoy the fact they’re making more money than ever and more people subscribe to Crunchyroll, it shouldn’t discount the fact that they don’t listen to anime fans’ views if they don’t think it’s profitable. Physical media is important because you own that copy of your favourite anime. You can have that boxset on your shelf! You can play the boxset whenever you like! If Crunchyroll lose the license, they can’t take your boxset away from you! That’s yours!
So yeah physical media is pretty important huh. Not sure how else I should end this article to be honest.
Bye-been!
