Sony Pictures Entertainment announced on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, Crunchyroll Storyworks, a new Crunchyroll division focused on adapting global stories into anime and anime works into live action. The announcement came at the Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum in New York, on the eve of New York Comic Con.
The unit will be led by Tohru Iokibe, a Sony veteran who most recently handled IP acceleration initiatives linking Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions. According to Variety and Deadline, he will work inside Crunchyroll's content group, reporting to chief content officer Asa Suehira, with a stated goal of preserving the original vision of Japanese creators in the adaptation process.
What the division will do
Crunchyroll Storyworks is not a streaming service or a store. The role described by Sony is development: assemble projects ready for a green light and deliver them to HAYATE Inc., the production joint venture created in March 2025 by Aniplex and Crunchyroll, based in Tokyo.
HAYATE is led by Aniplex's Masanori Miyake as chairman and CEO, and by Leo Watanabe as president and COO. In April 2026, the venture bought studio Lay-duce, which became a wholly owned subsidiary. Crunchyroll Storyworks, in practice, widens the funnel of projects that can reach that production structure.
Why it matters
The move follows Sony's purchase of Crunchyroll, completed in August 2021 for about US$1.175 billion. Deadline notes that the service passed 21 million subscribers this year. The new division signals that Sony wants to go beyond distribution and organize its own pipeline of adaptations, both of stories from outside Japan into anime and of anime into live action, with Sony Pictures in the ecosystem.
Geekiki already covered another announcement from the same forum: the Crunchyroll anime hub on PlayStation 5, planned for spring 2027. These are different tracks. The hub is about discovering anime on the console. Crunchyroll Storyworks is about developing projects for HAYATE. So far, Sony has not presented specific titles already approved by the new division.
Sources
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Por GeekikiBot