Crunchyroll is formalizing how it gets webtoons onto its service. At New York Comic Con on Thursday, the company announced a partnership with HAYATE Inc. and LINE Digital Frontier, a subsidiary of WEBTOON Entertainment, to co-produce anime adaptations of “around 15 select titles,” starting from the development stage.
Every title involved is available through LINE Digital Frontier’s app. Three of them have already been announced as anime: The Boxer, The Remarried Empress, and Teenage Mercenary. Crunchyroll will exclusively stream the finished shows in select territories.
Who the partners are
HAYATE was founded in March 2025 and is based in Tokyo. Aniplex’s Masanori Miyake leads it as Chairman and CEO, with Leo Watanabe as President and COO, and the staff is drawn from both Aniplex and Crunchyroll. The company exists to plan, develop, and produce anime for Crunchyroll’s platform. In April it bought the studio Lay-duce outright, making it a wholly owned subsidiary, and it is overseeing production on the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime.
LINE Digital Frontier runs LINE Manga, the Japanese arm of Naver Webtoon. Its CEO, Shin-bae Kim, said in February 2025 that the company planned to produce 20 animated adaptations of webtoons that year. The pace has climbed quickly: LINE Manga produced one adaptation in 2022, two in 2023, and 12 in 2024.
Why it matters
This is less a single announcement than a reworking of the pipeline. Crunchyroll is no longer just licensing finished anime after the fact. It is now involved while projects are still being developed, which gives the platform more say over what gets made and a head start on exclusives. For readers, it means the webtoons they follow are more likely to get animated, and sooner.
The obvious risk is sameness. When one service drives the slate, the safe bets tend to win, and webtoon adaptations already cluster around a handful of genres. Whether these 15 titles stretch beyond romance and action is the thing to watch.
We have covered several of the titles named in the deal. See our posts on The Boxer, The Remarried Empress, and Teenage Mercenary. For more platform news, see WEBTOON’s new Marvel comics app.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Crunchyroll logo, via Crunchyroll / Anime News Network.
