Why Webtoon Anime Is Taking Over Crunchyroll

The next era of anime might be drawn on a phone screen. At the Crunchyroll Showcase on day one of New York Comic Con 2026 in October, anime studio HAYATE, LINE Digital Frontier and Crunchyroll unveiled a co-production partnership to develop around fifteen WEBTOON titles into full anime series — the boldest Webtoon Anime push the streamer has ever made.

The deal puts development and production in HAYATE's hands, with the Tokyo studio — staffed by Aniplex and Crunchyroll employees and founded in March 2025, according to Wikipedia — collaborating with Crunchyroll and LINE Digital Frontier from the earliest development stage. LINE Digital Frontier, WEBTOON Entertainment's Japanese arm, supplies the source material through its mobile app, and Crunchyroll will stream the finished anime exclusively in select territories. The structure is new for this Webtoon Anime slate: instead of licensing a finished manga and adapting it alone, the three partners are building the series together from day one.

The showcase revealed the first three titles with trailers. The Remarried Empress, a fantasy romance about empress Navier rebuilding her life after her emperor husband takes a mistress, arrived with character art, a promo trailer and the first reveal of its main staff and voice cast, and is slated for 2027, as reported by Anime UK News. Teenage Mercenary — also known as Mercenary Enrollment, by creators YC and Rakhyun — debuted a teaser visual and an action-packed promo trailer; the story of a former child soldier returning to high school life has gathered more than one point eight six billion views and topped LINE Manga's annual rankings two years running. The Boxer, the psychological boxing drama by manhwa artist JH about the prodigy Yu, was newly announced with its own promo trailer.

HAYATE president and CEO Leo Watanabe said the partnership would turn "globally loved digital-native stories into world-class anime franchises," as reported by Three If By Space. LINE Digital Frontier representative director Hiroshi Mori said the effort continues the company's drive to "create the future of manga," while Crunchyroll chief content officer Asa Suehira said the collaboration would introduce the titles to new audiences while staying true to the originals. The ambition is explicit: these are meant to become global franchises, not one-off adaptations.

The timing makes sense when you look at the numbers. The global anime market hit a record twenty five billion dollars in 2024, up fourteen point eight percent year over year, with markets outside Japan growing twenty six percent to overtake the domestic market, according to the Association of Japanese Animations survey reported by Three If By Space. In a survey of nearly twenty nine thousand entertainment consumers across seven countries and regions, forty four percent of those aged thirteen to fifty four called themselves anime fans — and among Generation Z, the figure reached fifty four percent. Crunchyroll's answer is a standing Webtoon Anime production pipeline: LINE Digital Frontier CEO Shin-bae Kim said in 2025 the company would pursue more animated adaptations, and LINE Manga produced twelve animated adaptations in 2024, up from two in 2023 and one in 2022, according to Redbeanime.

Solo Leveling Wrote the Playbook for This Webtoon Anime Slate

The Webtoon Anime strategy has a proven template. Crunchyroll already streamed two seasons of the Solo Leveling webtoon adaptation, co-produced by Aniplex, Crunchyroll, D&C Media, Netmarble and Kakao Piccoma, and it became one of the platform's signature hits. The new deal is an attempt to repeat that success at industrial scale. For a preview of the production values the partners are promising, Solo Leveling's upcoming big-screen project shows where the bar has been set.

The Webtoon Anime boom carries real risk, though. Rapid adaptation pipelines can trade polish for volume, and manhwa fans have watched beloved series arrive with uneven animation before. There is also competing noise: a separate adaptation of The Remarried Empress has previously been reported in development for another streamer, as reported by GameTrader Singapore, so fans may eventually face two versions of the same story. Crunchyroll's counter is ownership of the process — HAYATE leads development from the ground up — but the episodes will be judged one by one.

What to Read and Watch Next

If you want to get ahead of the 2027 premieres, the reading list is short. The Remarried Empress, Teenage Mercenary and The Boxer are all available now through LINE Digital Frontier's mobile app, and all three are worth reading before the anime arrives. For a sense of how the Webtoon Anime format translates to screen, the two seasons of Solo Leveling on Crunchyroll remain the reference point.

More announcements are expected in the coming months as the partners work through the remaining titles in the fifteen-series slate, and the Webtoon Anime era shows no sign of slowing. The message from New York Comic Con 2026 is clear: the next wave of anime will be drawn for phones first. For more coverage on this beat, see our anime and animation topic page.