Sony Pictures Entertainment introduced a new production division on Wednesday. Crunchyroll Storyworks will adapt global stories into anime and anime into live-action, and the company announced the move during the Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum in New York.
Tohru Iokibe, a Sony executive, leads the division. Storyworks exists to provide projects that can be greenlit for HAYATE Inc., the anime production venture that Aniplex and Crunchyroll set up together.
What Storyworks is for
The remit runs in two directions. Storyworks takes stories from outside Japan and develops them as anime, and it takes existing anime and develops live-action versions. One Crunchyroll-branded team now sits on both sides of the adaptation trade. The division is also meant to work directly with Japanese creators.
Sony has reasons to want that pipeline in-house. It owns Sony Pictures, a film and television studio, and it co-owns Crunchyroll with Aniplex. Turning anime into live-action is hardly a new idea, but doing it under the same roof as the streaming platform that hosts the original is a tighter loop than most studios have.
HAYATE, the production partner
HAYATE Inc. was founded in March 2025 and is headquartered in Tokyo. Aniplex’s Masanori Miyake is chairman and CEO, with Leo Watanabe as president and COO. Its staff comes from Aniplex and Crunchyroll.
The venture plans, develops and produces anime for Crunchyroll’s streaming platform worldwide. In April it acquired all shares of the anime studio Lay-duce, making Lay-duce a wholly owned subsidiary.
Read together, the two outfits form a chain. Storyworks finds material and prepares it for production. HAYATE turns the greenlit projects into finished anime, and Crunchyroll streams the results.
The wider Sony picture
Crunchyroll is an independently operated joint venture between Sony Pictures Entertainment and Aniplex, and both parents sit under the Sony Group umbrella in Tokyo. Crunchyroll runs the largest dedicated anime library in the world, which is a big part of why Sony wanted control of it.
Original development is a newer ambition. The service has spent the year adding franchise titles such as the new Sgt. Frog anime KERORO☆ and Battle Spirits [Re] Zekkai no Kū. A studio arm that develops its own projects would take that a step further, putting Crunchyroll closer to the start of the line.
Sony’s Funimation Global Group bought Crunchyroll from AT&T on August 9, 2021, after first announcing the deal in December 2020. The price was US$1.175 billion, paid in cash at closing. Funimation’s home video releases now carry the Crunchyroll label.
The company has spent the past year tightening its commercial model. Crunchyroll raised prices on all of its U.S. subscription tiers in February, and it ended free ad-supported streaming last December. A production arm that feeds originals to the platform fits that direction.
Why it matters
For a company that already owns the biggest dedicated anime streaming service, the interesting part of Storyworks is not that Sony wants more anime. It is the live-action side. Folding anime-to-live-action development into a Crunchyroll division suggests Sony wants to control a property’s full life, from the anime that builds the audience to the adaptation that chases a wider one.
That cuts both ways for fans. More money pointed at anime production can mean more shows get made. It can also concentrate decision-making in one company that owns the platform, the studio partners and the source deals. Where those decisions land will show up in what reaches Crunchyroll over the next few years.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Deadline (Dade Hayes).
Featured image: Crunchyroll logo, via Anime News Network.
