Crunchyroll, the popular streaming service for anime, is now producing (and co-producing) a number of brand new anime series for 2020.
With eight new series launching under the Crunchyroll Originals name, this marks the first time that the service has ventured into making its own content – usually just acting as a distribution platform for licensed shows and movies from other studios.
We’ve now got our first trailer for the Crunchyroll Originals 2020 programming, which you can find below – with as many twisted monsters, cutesy teenagers, oversized weapons, and close-ups of emotion-heavy eyes as you’d expect.
The shows listed include Onyx Equinox, In/Spectre, the God of High School, Meiji Gekken: Sword & Gun, Tower of God, High Guardian Spice, Noblesse, FreakAngels.
There's no set release date for the shows, though we expect them all to land, or start dropping episodes, at some point in 2020. The trailer itself simply says "coming soon", which would feel misleading if the shows weren't coming this year.
The trailer has plenty of flashy sequences and sleek cutaways, but the best thing in it might be the promise of more to come, either in 2020 or beyond: "And that's just the beginning."
Do it yourself
While it's noteworthy that Crunchyroll is branching into producing its own content, the anime service is slightly behind the curve in this regard.
Heavyweights like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have been creating their own exclusive content for years now, and as competing streaming sites attempt to build up their own anime libraries – as with HBO Max's Studio Ghibli deal in the US, or Netflix's animated Witcher movie – it's going to get progressively harder for Crunchyroll to retain its position as the best anime streaming service of the lot.
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