Crunchyroll feels that more shojo anime should be produced in order to meet the expanding shojo anime following in the West.
Crunchyroll’s chief customer officer Asa Suehira presented a presentation on changing trends in viewership at a business conference for the streaming company’s Japanese partners, according to Anime News Network. Shira emphasized the growing market for shows aimed primarily at a female audience, pointing out that shojo anime tends to outperform in international markets. This trend, according to the Crunchyroll executive, is due to the vast number of female fans in Western countries, as well as the limited number of series made exclusively for them. “Shojo, josei, and even certain BL titles are performing better than expected in the west, where female anime viewers have historically been underserved with appropriate content,” he noted.
Suehira mentioned Fruits Basket, a popular romance animation, as an illustration of the market’s tremendous development potential. Since its debut in the late 1990s, the shojo anime has remained popular, and when it was redone in 2019, it sparked newfound attention. Fruits Basket is still one of the most popular anime and manga franchises, with Fruits Basket: The Final topping MyAnimeList’s user-generated top 10 rankings and winning Anime of the Year at the 8th Anime Trending Awards in 2021.
Modern romance anime has grown in popularity in tandem with the surge in popularity of shojo titles, with shows like Komi Can’t Communicate, Horimiya, and Kaguya-sama: Love is War attracting large female fans bases in Western markets. Over the duration of its broadcast run, Kaguya-sama: Love is War has remained immensely popular; the anime will return for a third season on April 8.
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Additional evidence reveals that male viewers are venturing out into genres that have historically been classified as shojo. While shonen and battle-action anime continue to reign supreme, Suehira said that romantic comedies are now attracting a sizable male following, as evidenced by the romantic comedy My Dress-Up Darling, which has been one of the most popular series of 2022 thus far. Other genres, including a slice of life, comedy, and drama, have also seen an increase in popularity on Crunchyroll.
Crunchyroll has grown to become one of the largest anime distributors outside of Japan. Crunchyroll was purchased by Sony in 2021, which already owned anime localization business Funimation. Funimation’s library of over 800 anime movies was recently integrated onto Crunchyroll’s platform, resulting in the world’s largest streaming library of anime, according to the firm.
