Crunchyroll, HAYATE and LINE Digital Frontier Team for Around 15 Webtoon Anime
The deal folds webtoon adaptation into the same pipeline as Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, with HAYATE, a venture staffed by Aniplex and Crunchyroll employees, handling development for Crunchyroll's platform.
Reporting from 1 source: Anime News Network.
Crunchyroll, HAYATE Inc., and WEBTOON Entertainment subsidiary LINE Digital Frontier have partnered on co-productions of anime adaptations for around 15 select webtoon titles, starting from the development stage. All the titles are available through LINE Digital Frontier's app, including the already announced The Boxer, The Remarried Empress, and Teenage Mercenary. Crunchyroll will stream the resulting anime in select territories.
Crunchyroll announced the partnership at New York Comic Con on Thursday. HAYATE Inc., founded in March 2025 and based in Tokyo, is led by Chairman and CEO Masanori Miyake of Aniplex and President and COO Leo Watanabe, with a staff drawn from Aniplex and Crunchyroll. It focuses on planning, developing, and producing anime for Crunchyroll's streaming platform worldwide.
LINE Digital Frontier operates LINE Manga, the Japanese subsidiary of Naver Webtoon, and CEO Shin-bae Kim said in February 2025 that the company would produce 20 webtoon animated adaptations that year.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.