Senior Software Engineer

Crunchyroll reveals Beyond the Spider-Verse footage, anime division. October 9, 2026 Crunchyroll announced several company expansions, including a brand new division and partnerships with PlayStation and manga publishers during the inaugural Anime Future Forum. The event, which featured appearances by James Gunn and Samuel L. Jackson - who replaced previously announced guest Guillermo del Toro - alongside new footage from and details about the production of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, was part of the first-ever thought leadership event held at the Javits Center in New York. There, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Ravi Ahuja took the stage to announce Storyworks, which will combine the powers of Crunchyroll, Aniplex, Japan's creative community, and Sony Pictures to develop global stories into anime as well as Japanese anime into live-action. Reporting to Crunchyroll's chief content officer Asa Suehira, 25-year Sony veteran Tohru Iokibe will lead the division, which will tap Japanese creators to preserve and center the original creative visions of various high-quality, greenlight-ready projects for Crunchyroll's joint venture with Aniplex, HAYATE. "Anime has become a global cultural force because it has been shaped over decades by the creators, studios and publishers who have nurtured and developed its distinctive storytelling and unforgettable characters," said Ahuja. "As anime grows, we have a responsibility to protect and amplify what makes it special while always keeping creators' visions at the center. That's the goal of Storyworks." Along with the division announcement, Crunchyroll revealed that, starting Wednesday, it's expanding its digital manga presence in English-speaking international markets through the premium add-on Crunchyroll Manga. Fans in places like the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal and Pakistan will now be able to access localized English versions of more than 250 titles from leading publishers. J-Novel Club, Square Enix, and Yen Press are among the first partners, with additional titles and publishers to come, including action IP from VIZ Media. Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino also used the event to announce that beginning next spring, anime will have a new dedicated space within the PlayStation5 home experience centered on anime and anime-inspired games, while also providing access to Crunchyroll. The news comes as Crunchyroll and PlayStation partner on the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime series. "Anime fans and gamers have always shared similar interests, and this new anime addition is designed to make it easier for the PlayStation community to discover more anime content they enjoy," added Nishino. "PlayStation is committed to delivering an anime experience to our community." As part of the event's final company announcement, president of Crunchyroll Rahul Purini celebrated the theatrical success of Demon Slayer last year - a recurring theme of some panels - before touting a new report, produced with partner NRG. "Last year, I was in Mexico City for the premiere of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. Fans started lining up at 6 in the morning for a midday premiere. We filled more than 10 screens," Purini told the room. Released Wednesday, and featuring the voices of fans in 11 different markets on four continents, the Global State of Anime Fandom 2026 study found that "outside Japan, two out of three fans are watching more anime than they were three years ago," and that "more than three out of four fans have introduced anime to someone who had never watched it," Purini said. As part of the company's effort to make data around anime viewership more accessible, Crunchyroll Compass, the data and insights platform for licensors and partners, has also added new features to help track how titles are performing on the platform. Data on performance by country, digital manga reporting, and, for the first time, data from MyAnimeList - the world's largest online anime and manga database - will be available. "What fans watch, and what the community is saying, in one place. And there is more to come," Purini teased. "Creators start the story. Fans carry it forward. Crunchyroll is here to serve them both." Throughout the rest of the day, a mix of business, trend and consumer panels spanning anime film and TV, influencer-creators, manga publishing, gaming and more explored how the industry ecosystem is exploding, connecting creators and audiences as it "crosses languages, cultures and borders," said Purini. Among the day's biggest conversations was a closed-door morning panel featuring James Gunn and Otsuka-san, with Iwakami-san, who discussed franchise-building, and an evening panel featuring Samuel L. Jackson, who spoke about his own path into anime, including work on the 2007 Afro Samurai adaptation as well as how he picks his projects and his relationship to major franchises like Star Wars and the MCU. Another of the day's bigger panels featured Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse co-director Bob Persichetti, who was among a guest list that also included rapper Big Sean, Olympic gold medalist figure skater Amber Glenn, content creator Jordan Howlett and Roy Lee, producer and founder of Vertigo Entertainment. Appearing on a panel moderated by Kristine Belson, president of Sony Pictures Animation, Persichietti unpacked what the animation and anime industries can learn from the Spider-Verse's production and box-office success, as well as what the franchise's creatives learned while working on the films. "We learned in making the first two movies, and now the third, which we're deep in, the traditional pipeline for CG animation was very siloed off and segmented in its creative phases. The magic of film, live-action or even photography, is capturing spontaneity," Persichetti told the crowd of industry members. "The production process of animation is the least spontaneous thing on earth." This partly fueled the Spider-Verse team's decision to go beyond the CG animation pipeline. But as the Spider-Verse team pushed back against the homogenization of their work through CG - in a process Persichetti noted goes "off script all the time" - their own challenge to the industry standard became "chaotic" and "disruptive." "Over the course of the first movies and now the third, which we're deep in, we were being kind of chaotic in the way we did our work. We would send things into production, and then we would yank them back out of production and change them back. It was disruptive, obviously, to production. We've got to make the movie and by the release date," he told the crowd of industry leaders. "It was also a little bit limiting for us creatively because we were always fighting this wave of most of the movie is done. We can't go back. And yet we were thinking about things in a way that took time to cook." These experiences, said Persichetti, have led to the design of a new "Story" system used on the third film, a collaboration with Sony Pictures Animation, Imageworks and Unreal. New processes like StoryCamera, StoryPerformance and StoryLighting have been created and were utilized in the several minutes of work-in-progress footage the panel showcased. That material teased Beyond's continuation of Across the Spider-Verse's ending. Specifically, the introduction between Miles Morales and the Earth-42 "villain" version of himself known as The Prowler, the name Earth-1610's now-deceased Uncle Aaron Davis donned in Into the Spider-Verse. The process of creating these sequences, the director said, moved some aspects of the animation pipeline that were once tackled or managed later in production into the pre-production process with their newly created system. "If we put the word story in front of everything, people will not think we aren't in production, and it will free us," the filmmaker said. "All of these things kind of smash on the left side of production. And [when] we did all this work, what we realized is we're bringing more of our artists into the process; people [are] having more creative input; we're seeing more creative choices; we're able to think about the movie holistically, creatively, much earlier."

Sekiro anime hits Crunchyroll in January 2027, Ghost of Tsushima Legends set for 2028. Crunchyroll went heavy on video game adaptations at its New York Comic Con 2026 showcase, debuting world premiere footage of Sekiro: No Defeat and a first look at the Ghost of Tsushima Legends anime. The fully hand-drawn Sekiro series adapts FromSoftware's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and comes from KADOKAWA, Qzil.la, and ARCH. It streams exclusively on Crunchyroll as an eight-episode series starting January 2027. Ghost of Tsushima Legends arrives in 2028. The showcase also offered a sneak peek at a work-in-progress trailer for Ghost of Tsushima Legends, the anime based on the online multiplayer mode of the Sucker Punch PlayStation game. Studio HAYATE is producing the series in collaboration with PlayStation Productions, and it arrives in 2028. Takanobu Mizuno directs, with Psycho-Pass writer Gen Urobuchi handling series composition and script alongside scriptwriter Satoshi Maejima. Afro Samurai creator and 2026 Emmy winner Takashi Okazaki serves as character designer, Keiji Inai composes the music, and Yoshikazu Iwanami is the sound director. The voice cast includes Mayumi Saco and Shinya Fukumatsu. PlayStation keeps pushing its games beyond consoles, as Sony also has the Helldivers movie in the works with Alan Ritchson in talks to star for director Justin Lin. Crunchyroll and WEBTOON team on 15 anime. Crunchyroll, HAYATE, and LINE Digital Frontier, a subsidiary of WEBTOON Entertainment, announced a co-production partnership to develop anime adaptations of around 15 WEBTOON titles. The three companies will collaborate from the development stage, with HAYATE leading production and Crunchyroll streaming the resulting anime exclusively in select territories. Three titles got reveals at the showcase: The Remarried Empress, a newly announced adaptation with character art and a promo trailer revealing its main staff and cast. Teenage Mercenary, with a new teaser visual and trailer; and The Boxer, another new adaptation with its first promo trailer. Kagurabachi, EAT-MAN, and more new series. Kagurabachi, the hit Shonen Jump revenge story, comes to Crunchyroll next year, and attendees got exclusive in-room access to new character art. The series follows Chihiro Rokuhira, who takes up the enchanted blade left behind by his swordsmith father and sets out for revenge against the Hishaku sorcerer organization. Crunchyroll also revealed a first look at EAT-MAN, a new adaptation of the 1997 series about Bolt Crank, a mercenary who can eat anything and later reproduce it fully intact and functional. World premiere trailers dropped for Here U Are, the January 2027 rom-com Everyone's Darling Has a Secret, and The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, which comes from the director of Horimiya and the character designer of Oshi no Ko, with a cast that includes Mariya Ise and Akari Kito. Magical Buffs: The Support Caster is Stronger Than He Realized! showed off a new trailer and key art ahead of its premiere next year, and LiSA performs the opening theme. Berserk of Gluttony Season 2 got a sneak peek as well, with Fate Graphite returning to the royal capital as a Holy Knight. Anime is also big business on the live-action side, as Sony develops a Kaiju No. 8 movie and Lionsgate shoots its live-action Naruto next year. Yuri on ICE returns to theaters October 19. For its 10th anniversary, Yuri!!! on ICE hits theaters across the U.S. and Canada for one night on October 19 at 7:00 PM local time, screening the first five episodes as part of Crunchyroll's Anime Nights program. The ufotable movie Witch on the Holy Night, distributed by Crunchyroll and Sony Pictures, opens exclusively in theaters on January 29, 2027, in both English dub and subtitled Japanese. TYPE-MOON's remastered Witch on the Holy Night visual novel also comes to Crunchyroll Game Vault next year on iOS and Android, exclusively for Mega Fan members and above. Crunchyroll Manga celebrates one year since launching in the U.S. and Canada, with the library topping 450 titles following this month's update. New titles arrive October 12, including Strange Pictures and High Elf With a Long Life. Crunchyroll's NYCC programming continues through the weekend with an Apothecary Diaries panel on October 9 featuring Japanese voice stars Aoi Yuki and Takeo Otsuka, and a Black Clover Season 2 screening and live dubbing with Gakuto Kajiwara and Dallas Reid on October 10. Xandar covers anime, film, and independent entertainment for Cosmic Book News through industry updates, reviews, and talent interviews. He previously held ownership of critical operations within a Fortune 500 company, where his analytical judgment helped guide decisions. He is an award-winning screenwriter. As a filmmaker, he directed an independent feature distributed in more than 40 countries. He is also the creative director and writer behind *Dragon Ball EndTime*, a fan comic that has reached more than 100,000 readers. For Xandar, fandom is more than entertainment. It is where imagination becomes mythology, and the stories Cosmic Book love become part of who Cosmic Book is.

NYCC 2026: WEBTOON announces series set for anime adaptations. By Josh Piedra Posted: October 8, 2026 5:48 PM EDT HAYATE, LINE Digital Frontier Corporation, a subsidiary of WEBTOON Entertainment, and Crunchyroll today announced an anime co-production partnership focused on adapting a slate of WEBTOON series titles into anime. Under this framework, the three companies will join forces from the development stage on potential anime adaptations of around 15 select titles. HAYATE will lead the development and production in collaboration with Crunchyroll and LINE Digital Frontier, and Crunchyroll will exclusively stream the resulting anime in select territories. Each announced anime is based on a webcomic available through LINE Digital Frontier's mobile application. The partnership was unveiled during the Crunchyroll Showcase at New York Comic Con, alongside new announcements and materials for the following three HAYATE productions based on WEBTOON series. In addition, the companies shared news and reveals surrounding the following titles: The Remarried Empress (a newly announced anime adaptation, with character art, special promo trailer that revealed the main production staff and main cast); Teenage Mercenary (a new teaser visual and special promo trailer revealed); and The Boxer (a newly announced anime adaptation, with a special promo trailer revealed). "We see a tremendous opportunity to transform globally loved digital-native stories into world-class anime franchises," said Leo Watanabe, President and CEO of HAYATE. "Through close collaboration with LINE Digital Frontier and Crunchyroll, HAYATE is committed to creating adaptations that faithfully capture the spirit of the original works while leveraging the unique creative strengths of anime. Our ambition is to help these stories evolve into global franchises that resonate with fans around the world." "Japanese anime has become a cultural force loved by audiences around the world. We are delighted that this partnership will allow us to bring our WEBTOON series to fans in Japan and across the globe in an exciting new form: anime. We will continue our tireless efforts to "create the future of manga." said Hiroshi Mori, Representative Director of LINE Digital Frontier. "Bringing great stories to anime fans around the world is at the heart of what we do at Crunchyroll. Working alongside HAYATE and LINE Digital Frontier, this collaboration creates an exciting opportunity to introduce these titles and their unique worlds to new audiences through the power of anime, while staying true to the spirit of the original works," said Asa Suehira, Chief Content Officer of Crunchyroll. "We look forward to creating meaningful new connections between these stories and fans globally." Japanese anime continues to strengthen its presence on the global stage. According to the latest survey by The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA), the anime industry reached a record-high market size of $25.36 billion in 2024, up 14.8% year over year. Markets outside of Japan were the primary driver of this growth, expanding 26.0% year over year to $14.33 billion and significantly surpassing Japan market, which stood at $11.03 billion (*1). The rise of viewership of anime is also becoming increasingly evident. At the same time, the anime fan base continues to expand worldwide. In a survey of approximately 29,000 entertainment consumers across seven countries and regions, 44% of respondents aged 13 to 54 identified themselves as anime fans. Among Generation Z, that figure rises to 54%, placing anime fandom on par with the fan bases of some of the world's biggest music artists and professional athletes. Senior Editor, Anime & Manga Josh has been an anime fan for over twenty years. In addition, he is a light novel author with 38 books published across 5 series! He is also the owner of Meteora Press, his personal dba serving as a publishing label. Anime and otaku culture isn't Josh's only area of expertise. He also has a Bachelor of Arts in Game Design and has created a handful of independent games along with a deep working knowledge of the gaming industry.