![]() The company also says that its user base - primarily centered in the U.S., followed by Western Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Australia, with plans to expand in Southeast Asia - is growing meaningfully across all age groups, but it’s exploding in the 13-17 and 18-25 age segments. It opens stateside and in Europe on April 14.Ĭrunchyroll says its internal research shows that about 300 million people around the world watched Japanese anime in some form or another in 2022 - which is double 2020’s total viewership. ![]() Crunchyroll’s next major theaterical outing will be anime hitmaker Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume, which has already earned $103 million in Japan. ![]() Other successes have included 2021’s Jujutsu Kaisen 0 ($34.5 million in NA, $166.7 million worldwide) and last year’s Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero ($38 million/$48.5 million). In 2020, Crunchyroll released Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train (2020), earning $50 million in the North America out of the film’s $453 million worldwide total. In 2020, the Association of Japanese Animators reported that the international market for Japanese anime surpassed the domestic Japanese market for the very first time (about $11.5 billion vs $11 billion). The growth is most readily visible in the outsized sums anime titles have been earning at the box office, even in the pandemic era. “We have made internal estimates of how big the anime market will be, and we’ve underestimated its growth every year,” says Purini. The perks that come with the priciest Crunchyroll subscription span all these categories (special access to Crunchyroll events, screenings, merch, etc.).īut this solidly diversified business ecosystem would mean far less to Sony if anime culture weren’t undergoing a global explosion of popularity - and it most certainly is. Nascent mobile gaming and an anime music streaming service are also gaining momentum on the service - business lines that will only benefit from further integration with Sony. It also hosts a growing number of regular live events - mostly in the U.S., including anime fan conventions, expos and an awards show - and is expanding its merchandising operations, catering to anime fandom’s penchant for collecting (in August, Crunchyroll acquired Right Stuf, the top online retailer of anime goods and manga in North America). The company is also the leading theatrical distributor of anime movies in North America, where it has released ten of the top 20 all-time highest-grossing titles in the category (more on this later). Cruncyroll reported earlier this year that it had 10 million paying subscribers and Purini says the streaming operation is “solidly profitable” (although Sony doesn’t break out details). At the core of the service is a streaming platform boasting the largest online library of new and catalog anime content, with subscription options ranging from a free, ad-supported tier to three paid tiers (from $7.99 to $14.99) offering ad-free viewing and varying degrees of perks. “And these are the things we’ve always been focused on - not that we knew this was coming, but simply because Crunchyroll and Funimation spent many years as startups that needed to grow profitability to survive, and because a 360-degree flywheel approach is how the anime community actually wants to be served.”Īnime fans are a uniquely passionate community and Crunchyroll has long described its business as meeting its audience wherever they might be. “A couple of themes have emerged in the latest iteration of the disruption that streaming has brought to the entertainment space - the focus on profitability and the flywheel effect, or having a mix of mutually compounding revenue streams,” says Rahul Purini, a Funimation veteran since 2015 who was appointed as Crunchyroll’s president last year. Italy's Far East Film Festival Unveils Expansive Selection for 25th Anniversary Edition Sony once was thought to be paying a steep premium in the latter acquisition, but given the success and opportunity the company has created for itself in consolidating the anime niche, many analysts would now argue it was a bargain. The Crunchyroll of today is actually a merged service comprised of two former U.S.-based entities: Funimation, an anime platform founded by industry pioneer Gen Fukunaga in 1994, which Sony snapped up for $143 million in 2017 and Crunchyroll, the then-second-largest dedicated anime service, which the Japanese entertainment giant bought from AT&T in 2020 in a deal valued at $1.18 billion. In were financial discipline, multi-tiered subscription options and a more diversified approach to revenue generation. Out was the gusher approach to content spending in pursuit of limitless subscriber growth. As the global streaming business underwent a surprise, secular reassessment last year, Sony’s anime service Crunchyroll found the whole industry suddenly contemplating the same strategies it had been prioritizing for years.
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