Crunchyroll announced at New York Comic Con on Thursday that The Remarried Empress is getting a television anime. TROYCA is animating the adaptation of HereLee and SUMPUL’s webtoon, which itself adapts Alphatart’s original web novel, and it is set to broadcast next year.
Tetsuya Yanagisawa is directing. He previously worked on Berserk of Gluttony and High School DxD. Akiko Inoue, whose credits include An Observation Log of My Fiancée Who Calls Herself a Villainess, is supervising and writing the series scripts. Jun Nakai is designing the characters after work on GATE and NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a, and Yūki Fukazawa is composing the music.
No premiere window beyond “2027” has been given, and no cast has been announced yet.
What the story is
The Remarried Empress follows Navier, the Empress of the Eastern Empire who has built a reputation for being flawless at her role. Her husband, Emperor Sovieshu, plans to replace her with his mistress, so she chooses divorce instead of waiting to be cast aside. The rest of the story follows her effort to reclaim her standing by becoming an Empress in another land.
It is a romance at heart, and a fairly bitter one early on, since the setup depends on a husband who betrays a wife who did nothing to deserve it.
Scale of the source material
The webtoon has more than 2.97 billion global views and has been translated into 10 languages. It has a strong following internationally, with a notably large readership in Japan. The webtoon ended in January after a seven-year run, but it returns this fall with side stories.
The English version of the webtoon is available on WEBTOON, and Ize Press puts out the printed edition.
A live-action version comes first
Fans will not have to wait for the anime to see an adaptation. A live-action series premieres on Disney+ and Hulu on November 4. The two services will release two new episodes every Wednesday through the finale on November 25, for a total of 10 episodes.
It is unusual to get a live-action series and an anime of the same webtoon announced so close together, and the live-action release will likely shape how the anime is received. If the show lands well, the anime arrives with a warm audience already in place.
Why it matters
TROYCA is a small studio that does not take on many projects at once, so a title like this says something about how the company is picking work. The studio is best known for character-driven shows rather than action spectacles, which fits a court drama that lives on dialogue and political maneuvering.
The bigger picture is the webtoon pipeline. Crunchyroll has been steadily turning Korean webtoons into anime, and The Remarried Empress is one of the larger properties to get that treatment so far.
For another webtoon heading to screens, see our report on The Mafia Nanny’s live-action series at Hulu, and for platform news, WEBTOON Entertainment’s new co-CEOs.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: The Remarried Empress anime character visual, via Crunchyroll / Anime News Network.
