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What We Know About the Funimation-Crunchyroll Merger

Hopefully, we should see most of the popular and desirable Funimation titles transferred to CR. I'd imagine most of the older/obscure Funi shows from the 2000s and early 2010s were on the way out anyway, both in terms of the licenses and their relevancy/appeal to modern anime viewers. Is anyone going to lament Save Me! Lollipop falling out of availability?

It’s not true that they have no presence as even before the merger they held many home video licenses and over the years have entered into a few different partnerships to distribute them, from Shinkai DVDs with Bandai to cobranded discs with Funimation like Re:Zero.

I just... I just want blu ray releases with dubs for as many series as possible. I never want to have to stream. I never want to have to resort to subs. I just want to put in the disk and know it's the highest quality available that I can watch that show.

Ok, but you never payed for a funi subscription either, so shouldn't it not matter what the logo on the spine is so long as you can still buy shows?

Something I'm now wondering, with the FUNimation brand being phased out in favor of Crunchyroll, what's going to happen to the hundreds of in-print releases? When they get reprinted, are they going to replace the FUNimation logo with the Crunchyroll one, or are they going to have to re-release everything, possibly under a new UPC prefix? All FUNimation releases start with 704400.

The CR spokesman claimed: "As the companies have come together, we're assessing translation editorial and production across both brands and in all languages and regions, and have established best practices for compensation that are aligned competitively. We don't discuss compensation specifics for our full-time staff or contractors."

A translator who worked on Funimation simulcast subtitles told ANN anonymously that they were informed two days before Christmas that they would no longer receive work from the company. The call came two months after their rates were raised while the translator was doing preproduction work on Winter 2022 simulcasts.

To bad it wasn’t possible for them to keep both services running. I think running one as PG13 service and one as an uncutt service would have worked well for them. As far as home video there is no reason to go back to edited releases unless they want to kill their business.

Guys, remember that, contrary to what the branding may imply, the surviving company is Funimation. They are just rebranding Funimation Global Group to Crunchyroll LLC. Colin Decker (current General Manager of Funimation) and his management team will continue to oversee the "new" Crunchyroll.

Honestly, I won't expect any major changes to the way Funimation operates. Those answers are empty PR statements to cover their back.

Clearly, someone's making deliberate decisions not to add home-video versions to CR, whether it's someone in the Funi/CR/Sony ecosystem, or pressure from the Japanese side looking to make home-video versions exclusive to physical home-media releases. Maybe there's a worrisome "reverse-importation" issue with Japanese fans using VPNs to access uncut anime that would otherwise be Blu-Ray-only in Japan?