What Sony’s New Production Banner Hayate Means for Anime
By Movieguide® Contributor
Sony revealed its plans to create a new anime production team, combining two of its assets established in the genre: Crunchyroll and Aniplex.
Crunchyroll currently sits as the second-most popular anime streaming platform with 15 million subscribers, only trailing Netflix, which offers a respectable catalog in the genre. Crunchyroll’s library, however, vastly towers over Netflix, with 50,000 episodes and more than 25,000 hours of content currently available. Meanwhile, Aniplex is an anime studio which has been in the business for 30 years and worked on major shows such as ACE ATTORNEY, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST, NARUTO and PERSONA.
Both are currently subsidiaries of Sony and will now be joined under one banner: Hayate. By combining, the two will be able to share their resources to create even better shows, with Aniplex focusing on production, while Crunchyroll will primarily work on content development, marketing and distribution.
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Sony previously rolled its Funimation banner into Crunchyroll after acquiring the platform from AT&T for $1.2 billion in 2021. That platform currently averages an annual profit of $1.16 billion.
Anime has exploded with its U.S. audience in recent years as the niche genre has become mainstream, picking up tens of millions of viewers.
“In other English-speaking countries, there’s a lot [of people] that want to king of continue to branch out and and watch more and more new types of anime, so it’s a really helpful user acquisition tool,” said Michael Dempsey, an animation expert and general partner at Compound, when explaining how social media has helped the genre grow. “It’s definitely more mainstream. It’s not as contained towards niches as it used to be. I think that’s probably because there’s just a broader, continual hunger for animated content.”
Unfortunately, while the genre offers unique storylines and an incredible amount of content, as it has expanded its reach, many shows have relied on excessive content to fill out their stories. They’ve used tropes like excess violence or sexual content to try and make their stories more appealing, but that choice may soon backfire.
Texas is currently considering a bill which would potentially classify many anime shows as child porn because they feature sexualized characters that look like they are under the age of 18, even if they are canonically much older.
READ MORE: TEXAS TAKES NEXT STEP IN PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM SEXUAL PREDATORS
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