Kristine Belson and Bob Persichetti at Anime Future Forum Courtesy of Anime Future Forum Crunchyroll announced several company expansions, including a brand new division and partnerships with PlayStation and manga publishers during the inaugural Anime Future Forum.
The event, which featured appearances by James Gunn and Samuel L. Jackson — who replaced previously announced guest Guillermo del Toro — alongside new footage from and details about the production of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, was part of the first-ever thought leadership event held at the Javits Center in New York. There, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Ravi Ahuja took the stage to announce Storyworks, which will combine the powers of Crunchyroll, Aniplex, Japan’s creative community, and Sony Pictures to develop global stories into anime as well as Japanese anime into live-action.
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Reporting to Crunchyroll’s chief content officer Asa Suehira, 25-year Sony veteran Tohru Iokibe will lead the division, which will tap Japanese creators to preserve and center the original creative visions of various high-quality, greenlight-ready projects for Crunchyroll’s joint venture with Aniplex, HAYATE.
“Anime has become a global cultural force because it has been shaped over decades by the creators, studios and publishers who have nurtured and developed its distinctive storytelling and unforgettable characters,” said Ahuja. “As anime grows, we have a responsibility to protect and amplify what makes it special while always keeping creators’ visions at the center. That’s the goal of Storyworks.”
Along with the division announcement, Crunchyroll revealed that, starting Wednesday, it’s expanding its digital manga presence in English-speaking international markets through the premium add-on Crunchyroll Manga. Fans in places like the U.K., Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Nepal and Pakistan will now be able to access localized English versions of more than 250 titles from leading publishers. J-Novel Club, Square Enix, and Yen Press are among the first partners, with additional titles and publishers to come, including action IP from VIZ Media.
Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Hideaki Nishino also used the event to announce that beginning next spring, anime will have a new dedicated space within the PlayStation5 home experience centered on anime and anime-inspired games, while also providing access to Crunchyroll. The news comes as Crunchyroll and PlayStation partner on the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima: Legends anime series. “Anime fans and gamers have always shared similar interests, and this new anime addition is designed to make it easier for the PlayStation community to discover more anime content they enjoy,” added Nishino. “PlayStation is committed to delivering an anime experience to our community.”
As part of the event’s final company announcement, president of Crunchyroll Rahul Purini celebrated the theatrical success of Demon Slayer last year — a recurring theme of some panels — before touting a new report, produced with partner NRG. “Last year, I was in Mexico City for the premiere of Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. Fans started lining up at 6 in the morning for a midday premiere. We filled more than 10 screens,” Purini told the room.
Released Wednesday, and featuring the voices of fans in 11 different markets on four continents, the Global State of Anime Fandom 2026 study found that “outside Japan, two out of three fans are watching more anime than they were three years ago,” and that “more than three out of four fans have introduced anime to someone who had never watched it,” Purini said.
As part of the company’s effort to make data around anime viewership more accessible, Crunchyroll Compass, the data and insights platform for licensors and partners, has also added new features to help track how titles are performing on the platform. Data on performance by country, digital manga reporting, and, for the first time, data from MyAnimeList — the world’s largest online anime and manga database — will be available. “What fans watch, and what the community is saying, in one place. And there is more to come,” Purini teased. “Creators start the story. Fans carry it forward. Crunchyroll is here to serve them both.”
Throughout the rest of the day, a mix of business, trend and consumer panels spanning anime film and TV, influencer-creators, manga publishing, gaming and more explored how the industry ecosystem is exploding, connecting creators and audiences as it “crosses languages, cultures and borders,” said Purini. Among the day’s biggest conversations was a closed-door morning panel featuring James Gunn and Otsuka-san, with Iwakami-san, who discussed franchise-building, and an evening panel featuring Samuel L. Jackson, who spoke about his own path into anime, including work on the 2007 Afro Samurai adaptation as well as how he picks his projects and his relationship to major franchises like Star Wars and the MCU.
Another of the day’s bigger panels featured Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse co-director Bob Persichetti, who was among a guest list that also included rapper Big Sean, Olympic gold medalist figure skater Amber Glenn, content creator Jordan Howlett and Roy Lee, producer and founder of Vertigo Entertainment. Appearing on a panel moderated by Kristine Belson, president of Sony Pictures Animation, Persichietti unpacked what the animation and anime industries can learn from the Spider-Verse’s production and box-office success, as well as what the franchise’s creatives learned while working on the films.
“We learned in making the first two movies, and now the third, which we’re deep in, the traditional pipeline for CG animation was very siloed off and segmented in its creative phases. The magic of film, live-action or even photography, is capturing spontaneity,” Persichetti told the crowd of industry members. “The production process of animation is the least spontaneous thing on earth.”
This partly fueled the Spider-Verse team’s decision to go beyond the CG animation pipeline. But as the Spider-Verse team pushed back against the homogenization of their work through CG — in a process Persichetti noted goes “off script all the time” — their own challenge to the industry standard became “chaotic” and “disruptive.”
“Over the course of the first movies and now the third, which we’re deep in, we were being kind of chaotic in the way we did our work. We would send things into production, and then we would yank them back out of production and change them back. It was disruptive, obviously, to production. We’ve got to make the movie and by the release date,” he told the crowd of industry leaders. “It was also a little bit limiting for us creatively because we were always fighting this wave of most of the movie is done. We can’t go back. And yet we were thinking about things in a way that took time to cook.”
These experiences, said Persichetti, have led to the design of a new “Story” system used on the third film, a collaboration with Sony Pictures Animation, Imageworks and Unreal. New processes like StoryCamera, StoryPerformance and StoryLighting have been created and were utilized in the several minutes of work-in-progress footage the panel showcased. That material teased Beyond’s continuation of Across the Spider-Verse’s ending. Specifically, the introduction between Miles Morales and the Earth-42 “villain” version of himself known as The Prowler, the name Earth-1610’s now-deceased Uncle Aaron Davis donned in Into the Spider-Verse.
The process of creating these sequences, the director said, moved some aspects of the animation pipeline that were once tackled or managed later in production into the pre-production process with their newly created system. “If we put the word story in front of everything, people will not think we aren’t in production, and it will free us,” the filmmaker said. “All of these things kind of smash on the left side of production. And [when] we did all this work, what we realized is we’re bringing more of our artists into the process; people [are] having more creative input; we’re seeing more creative choices; we’re able to think about the movie holistically, creatively, much earlier.”
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