Crunchyroll has always been known as a streaming anime service provider, normally adding content into their collection a day after it premiers in Japan. Customers have been begging the company for years to start providing feature length movies. It looks like the company has finally listened to their audience and and Fist of the North Star: The Movie and Jin Roh have both been added to the platform for members in the US and Canada.
The movies that Crunchyroll has licensed are from an American company named Discotek. The have a massive back catalog of content that will likely be brought over to the Crunchyroll platform within the next few months. These include feature length movies such as Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, Lupin the 3rd Vs Detective Conan, Card Captor Sakura: The Movie and a myriad of others.
This is a big win for Crunchyroll in North America, but European customers are left in a bit of a lark. The movies are not made available because of complex licensing agreements.
I think that this might be the start of Crunchyroll positioning themselves as a viable distribution platform for feature length anime movies. The only other companies to turn this into a business model are Hulu and Netlix, but they are only casually involved in anime, whereas Crunchyroll specializes in it.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
