Crunchyroll Is Making Anime For Thee, Not For Me
If you feel like every second new anime is another overpowered isekai hero stomping through a purple-tinted dungeon, you are not imagining it. The shape of seasonal anime is changing, and a big part of that comes back to who is helping pay for it.
Today, more than 1 in 6 new TV anime in 2025 has Crunchyroll listed somewhere in its production. That is a huge jump from the days when they were “just” a streaming service buying finished shows. It also means their business choices now have real weight on what gets animated, which genres dominate, and what most of us end up binging each season.
This is a look at how Crunchyroll moved from simple distributor to regular member of production committees, why that shift leans so hard on isekai and fantasy, and why that trend feels like anime is being shaped for mass tastes, not for viewers who want more variety.
Crunchyroll’s Shift From Distributor To Producer
From simple licensing to production committees
Once upon a time, companies like Crunchyroll mostly did one thing. They went to Japan, paid a fee, and licensed finished anime so they could stream it to places like North America and Australia. The creative and financial risks sat in Japan, and Western companies just fought over the streaming rights.
That era is mostly gone. Crunchyroll has absorbed a lot of its old rivals, and now sits up against giants like Netflix. In that fight, it is not enough to just turn up at the end and bid for the licence. So they have started getting in earlier, as members of production committees.
A production committee is the group of companies that put money into an anime before it exists. The list usually covers a publisher, a TV station, a music label, merch companies, sometimes a game company, and now, often, Crunchyroll.
Why Crunchyroll buys into committees
By joining those committees, Crunchyroll gets to lock in what matters most to them.
Some of the key benefits:
- Secured streaming rights in North America and other English-speaking regions
- Strong claim on home video rights for Blu-ray and DVD
- Control over merchandising rights in their markets
- Less scrambling in bidding wars once a show is already hot
They still carry risk, because they are putting money into something that has not aired and might be awful. They are also often far from the top of the committee list, so they are not steering the whole ship.
But if most of those bets pay off, they gain a fairly steady stream of titles that will land on their platform first. For them, that risk makes sense.
The risk that shapes the medium
Even if a particular series would have existed without Crunchyroll, their money still changes the maths. A tight production might be able to afford better schedule padding, or another cour, or simply get greenlit sooner because there is one more investor in the pot.
More money helps produce shows that might not otherwise exist or might otherwise stay as novels or webcomics.
That is where the wider impact starts. When a company that large is deciding what kinds of anime it wants to buy into, it is not just filling out its library. It is also quietly nudging which ideas get to move from manuscript or web novel queue into actual TV animation.
How Extra Funding Changes What Gets Made
On the studio side, things are stretched. A lot of major animation studios are already booked out for years. Schedules for the next five years of “major” anime are, in broad strokes, already known inside the industry, even if every staffer is locked under NDAs.
If studios are locked that far ahead, then what Crunchyroll is willing to co-fund today helps decide which projects land in those rare open slots. It also decides which of those finished shows get pushed in front of you on the front page of the app.
It is not that anime without Crunchyroll money can never be made. It is that if a studio has ten pitches on the table, and one comes bundled with a committed overseas distributor who wires cash into the committee, that pitch starts to look a lot more attractive.
So you end up with a loop. Crunchyroll looks at what does well on their service, they pick projects that look like more of that, and the studios line up production around those safer bets.
Case Study: My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s
A textbook Crunchyroll isekai
A neat example this year is My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s, a fantasy isekai that Crunchyroll helped co-produce and is now pushing quite hard. You can see how they frame it in the official promotional clip for My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s.
The setup will feel familiar to anyone who has watched even a handful of modern isekai:
- A class of high school students gets summoned to a fantasy world.
- Everyone presses their hand to a magic orb that spits out their stats and unique abilities.
- The kingdom that summoned them clearly has shady motives.
- The main character, Akira Oda, looks like a “mediocre” assassin on paper, then turns out to be absurdly strong. Stronger than the designated “hero” class.
It is all very bog-standard. Not awful, not amazing, just a comfy blend of magic systems, overpowered lead, and “trust no king” plotting. In the early episodes, it even feels a bit like The Rising of the Shield Hero in how the protagonist is used and discarded by the kingdom.
Shield Hero itself was a big title Crunchyroll pushed hard when it first aired. So when a new show comes along that hits some of the same notes, and Crunchyroll chooses to back it financially as well, it does not feel like a coincidence. It feels like pattern.
What “co-producing” really means for Crunchyroll
It is worth being clear about what “co-produced by Crunchyroll” usually means.
Most of the time:
- They are one name on a long production committee credit.
- Their main interest lies in distribution rights, not in story decisions.
- They want the licence to stream it first, release Blu-rays, and sell the figures and shirts.
That is very different to a situation where a foreign company sits at the top of the chain and dictates casting, scripts, or plot points. There might be rare cases where Crunchyroll has more say, especially around shows they heavily market as “Crunchyroll Originals”, but even that label often functions more like a branding tag than proof of deep creative control.
So when they back something like Assassin Status, they are not inventing it from scratch. That show almost certainly would have existed in some form. What Crunchyroll has done is put money in early and, in return, claimed the right to say, “this one is ours” when it hits Western streams.
The Feedback Loop: Why Isekai And Fantasy Dominate
A rough 2025 co-production slate
Look at the types of shows Crunchyroll has been attached to around 2025 and a pattern appears. The list mentioned includes titles like:
- Solo Leveling
- The Beginning After the End
- Water Magician
- The Rising of the Shield Hero Season 4
- Given the Worthless Appraiser Class
- Reincarnated as a Seventh Prince
- Salaryman Who Went to Another World and Became One of the Four Heavenly Kings
- I Left My A-Rank Party and Went to the Deepest Part of the Dungeon
- Clavitz (a darker fantasy)
- The Bogus Skill Fruit Master (shortened name)
- Noble on the Brink of Ruin, So Might as Well Try Mastering Magic
There are some variations, and not all are strict “died and woke in another world” isekai. A few are just standard fantasy with adventurer guilds and dungeons. But as a group, they clearly cluster around the Solo Leveling style of power fantasy.
Solo Leveling is a big part of why that cluster exists at all. Crunchyroll itself has talked about how its team loved the manhwa and pushed to get the anime made, as covered in this breakdown of Crunchyroll’s role in Solo Leveling’s production. The show then exploded in popularity, and executives everywhere took notes.
If a title that looks like Solo Leveling, feels like Solo Leveling, and uses similar colours and marketing can get even half that audience, that is a very easy sell for a committee or a studio.
Promotion, popularity, and the power to bury a show
Money in the committee is only half of the story. Once a season starts, Crunchyroll also decides which shows get front-page banners, social media campaigns, and trailers plastered everywhere.
That power can have two very different outcomes:
- A massive boost in awareness if they lean in.
- A quiet death blow if they give something almost no promotion.
There are exceptions. Something like Dandadan, which has strong buzz and other distributors in different regions, can soar even if Crunchyroll barely talks about it. There will always be one or two shows a year that succeed in spite of the platform.
On the flip side, we have cases like Odd Taxi. It sat on Crunchyroll for a while with little fanfare. Only when people started recommending it online, and reviewers like Geoff Thew (Mother’s Basement) made big videos on it, did the show catch fire. Once it had heat, Crunchyroll woke up and pushed it harder.
So their behaviour is reactive as well as proactive. If viewers binge something in huge numbers, even if they are hate-watching, that data will get fed back into future plans.
Isekai as escapist junk food
You can see why fantasy and isekai are so attractive in that context.
They are:
- Easy to market with one strong key visual.
- Simple to pitch in a single sentence.
- Built around escapist fantasies that tap into how miserable a lot of people feel about real life.
The core daydream is simple. Get hit by a truck, wake up in a nicer world, get magic powers, and have people adore you. Or, in a twist, get treated like trash, then return later as the most broken class in the system and rub everyone’s face in it.
These tropes lean on familiar character types, so viewers can tune in quickly. If you want to dig deeper into those archetypes and how they work across genres, a comprehensive guide to anime character archetypes is a handy refresher.
Whether critics like it or not, isekai performs. Articles on isekai trends, like this look at Crunchyroll’s growing stable of non‑Japanese isekai hits, show that the style has spread to manhua and donghua as well. There are web novels and webtoons lined up for adaptation to a practically bottomless degree.
From a numbers-only view, fantasy is a safe bet. If you are a big platform spending real money, chasing safe bets is the path of least resistance.
Beginning After the End and the Myth of “Quality”
A recent case really shows how little “quality” matters compared to sheer watch time.
The Beginning After the End is an adaptation of a popular American‑written web novel. The anime version has been widely criticised for flat production, weak animation, and failing to capture what fans love about the source. The consensus has not been kind.
Yet when you look at viewing data, it was still one of the most watched anime in the early part of 2025. The official Crunchyroll page for The Beginning After the End has no trouble finding an audience.
Some of that might be hate‑watching, some of it curiosity, some of it fans clinging to hope. But from a streaming company’s perspective, the details do not matter. If it keeps people subscribed and watching, the show is a success.
That tells services like Crunchyroll a few things:
- Adapting hit web novels and webtoons is usually safe.
- Viewers will show up, even if the adaptation is mediocre.
- Sticking to trendy genres brings in more views than taking big risks.
The logical outcome is more of the same, not fewer.
Personal Taste Versus Platform Priorities
Why sequels and big names get skipped
Not everyone watching seasonal anime wants to spend all their time on another fantasy power trip or the fifth season of something that already dominates social feeds.
That is why some reviewers largely skip sequels, prequels, and spin‑offs in their seasonal coverage. There is only so much time in each quarter. If every outlet talks about Solo Leveling Season 2, Fire Force Season 3, or a new Dandadan project, it is easy for smaller or weirder shows to disappear.
Skipping sequels in coverage opens space for oddball titles. That is how something like “Milky Subway” or a side project like Cinderella Gray can get some love, even if they spin off bigger IP or sit outside the standard isekai mould.
The shows that hit different
If you look at the anime that have really stuck with more variety‑seeking viewers over the past decade, the list tends to skew away from this current Crunchyroll‑friendly trend.
Think of series like:
- Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, a straight fantasy that is reflective rather than power‑hungry.
- Oddball titles like “Orb”, “Milky Subway”, and “Uamus” that bend genre expectations.
- Character‑driven shows such as Made in Abyss, Laid‑Back Camp, and A Place Further Than the Universe.
- Emotional standouts like Violet Evergarden.
- Music and youth culture hits like Bocchi the Rock!.
- Sports and idol hybrids under the Uma Musume banner.
Some of these did land on Crunchyroll, others did not, and even when they did, they were not always pushed hard until word of mouth exploded. Odd Taxi, again, is the classic case. The built‑in marketing muscle of the platform did not kick in until fans had already done most of the work.
If your favourite shows skew towards quiet character pieces, slow fantasy, or thoughtful sci‑fi, it is easy to feel like the service you rely on most is not exactly programming “for you” any more.
Guilty pleasures and rare exceptions
That does not mean everything Crunchyroll co‑produces in this trend is rubbish. There are some genuine guilty pleasures.
- May I Ask for One Final Thing? is a sharply funny series this season that Crunchyroll also helped co‑produce. It is a bright spot among the usual crowd.
- I Left My A‑Rank Party and Went to the Deepest Part of the Dungeon is another fantasy piece that many people enjoyed despite knowing it is far from top‑tier. Sometimes you just want to watch a red mage‑style main character clear out monsters and relax for a bit.
The problem is not that none of this is fun. The problem is that when almost everything on the slate looks like this, it crowds out other flavours.
Locked In For Five Years: Why The Future Looks Narrow
One of the more worrying details is how far ahead the industry is now booked.
If studios are tied up for the next five years, then what is trendy in 2025 does not just affect the next one or two seasons. It flows through to 2030. A manga or web novel that blows up this year might not see an anime until half a decade later, because slots are already spoken for by older trends.
That lag encourages producers to look backwards at what worked five years ago and try to repeat it.
Solo Leveling is a clear example. It did very well, helped by some impressive animation and staging. You can see how much it influenced the look of later projects. Promotional art for Assassin Status, with its heavy dark purples and cool assassin edge, feels at first glance like “Team Solo Leveling but slightly tweaked”.
If decision‑makers do not fully understand why Solo Leveling hit as hard as it did, they may double down on the most obvious parts. Dark palettes, edgy loners, stat screens, plenty of dungeon crawling. More of that kind of show, less of anything else.
And since there is an almost infinite supply of isekai‑style web novels and manhwa eager for adaptation, that pipeline is easy to keep full. Variety, on the other hand, needs people willing to take chances.
So, Is This The Evolution We Need Or Deserve?
Crunchyroll is not evil for wanting safe bets. From a business angle, backing fantasy and isekai that look like proven hits, then using their platform power to promote them, is a sensible move.
The cost is a slow narrowing of what anime on major services looks like. Animation can literally depict anything. Shrinking that down to yet another overpowered hero, in yet another game‑like world, feels like a waste of that potential.
If you care about seeing more than one flavour of anime survive, the best thing you can do is to talk about the shows that surprise you. Recommend the Odd Taxis and Frieren‑style character pieces, not only the latest dungeon crawler. Word of mouth is still one of the few forces that can shove a forgotten gem into the spotlight and nudge platforms to take notice.
In the end, Crunchyroll is making anime for thee, not for me. For the big crowd, not the niche taste. That is fine as long as we remember that numbers are not the only way to measure what is worth watching, and keep some space in each season for the odd, the quiet, and the risky.