Why did Crunchyroll’s subtitles just get worse?
A small change to operations may undermine a key differentiator for the anime streamer.
Since the most recent round of Crunchyroll layoffs, subscribers have noticed frequent issues such as new episodes airing late, audio tracks getting swapped, typesetting mishaps, and more. But now it looks like Crunchyroll is making a purposeful change to how they release new anime, and it’s not for the better.
But first: our simulcast ranking of August’s titles now that we’ve presented them to clients, an update of last issue’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle chart, and more… - Klaudia A.
Chart(s) of the Week
The middle of the summer simulcast season saw a few shifts in the rankings. But the top three firmly held their ranks.
One Piece returned to the top 10 in August because fans tuned back in to see the adaptation of fan-favorite moments from the manga.
Sakamoto Days’ second cour rose within the top 10 due to overall improvements in animation and storytelling quality that fans noticed and discussed at length online.
The Water Magician and Clevatess maintained high viewership despite spurring relatively little online discussion. This is a trend regularly consistent among isekai and isekai-adjacent fantasy titles—they have large audiences but low fandom engagement.
My Dress-Up Darling, on the other hand, created social discussion on par with the top 2 titles, Dan Da Dan and Gachiakuta, despite only receiving half their total viewership.
These titles exemplify a key trend in anime fandom: social media popularity, MyAnimeList ratings, and vote-in rankings are disproportionate to actual viewership. Some of the most viewed shows may be ones that seem like no one is talking about them. - Chloe C.
In our previous issue, I took over our Chart of the Week section to share a country-by-country comparison of the new Demon Slayer film’s opening weekends around the world. While I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the chart resonated with folks, there were two major pieces of feedback that I took to heart: 1) I included France too early (the data only included preview night), and 2) the PPP-adjusted ticket prices were not considered helpful.
So I’ve updated the chart accordingly:
The biggest change is that France is now at Mexico’s level. For decades, France has been one of the most voracious importers of Japanese media. In 2004, manga made up “almost a third” of the French comic market, a number that grew to about 40% a decade later. In 2023, 10% of the best-selling books in the country were volumes of One Piece.
It’s still beyond impressive to see Peru, Chile, and Ecuador so deep in the anime world, but perhaps less surprising if you look at what their most-watched TV on Netflix is in a given week. - Miles A.
Entertainment at Large
The Hollywood trend for sequels is pushing young fans away - and turning them onto anime (Popverse)
This is a really great insight from Dentsu’s most recent anime study. While the study didn’t tell us anything too new, I’m glad this point specifically was highlighted, because it’s something I try to express to colleagues often.
Many people claim that there’s something specific about anime or manga storytelling that’s fueling its popularity, and there’s some truth to that. But in actuality, anime is now an easy to access source of new IP for fans, which stand out from western mass media’s insistence on serving previous generations’ reheated leftovers. - Klaudia A.
Crunchyroll Commerce Chief Explains How Anime Streaming and Theatrical Releases Co-Exist (The Wrap)
While this article obviously focuses on anime, I think it has really good insights for all kinds of film and TV. Hollywood has been stressing over box office woes for years, and it’s clear that fans only have the money and time to show up to films when they’re eventized. His points about how streaming and theatrical can coexist are important—if cash-strapped fans are going to shell out for a movie ticket, it needs to add something to the experience, either because it is a highly anticipated continuation of an already beloved franchise (like Infinity Castle), or because they can finally see something great that they already love on the big screen (like KPop Demon Hunters).
Endless remakes, unneeded sequels, and theatrical-first new IP just cannot survive in this type of environment, but that doesn’t mean theatrical is dying—it’s just evolving to fit into a different part of an IP’s ideal roll-out. TLDR: New IP can thrive if it’s cheap and easy to access first, like on streaming or games, and then you can ladder up to in-person offerings (like theatrical) once you’ve built a fanbase. - Klaudia A.
Why did Crunchyroll’s subtitles just get worse?
Crunchyroll recently changed up how their subtitles look.
At first, this seems like a pretty small thing. Sure, the new subtitles are a little harder to read, but what’s the big deal? Let’s take a look at before and after what appears to be the switch, which happened right as the fall anime season started:
On the top, you can see a few details for how Crunchyroll typically stylizes their content:
Multiple overlapping speakers are represented on the top and bottom of the screen.
A bold font with both a colored stroke and a 100% opacity shadow is used for visual clarity.
Japanese text in the background is translated in an unobtrusive way, using a similar font.
This level of attention to detail makes for a better viewing experience, but it’s a lot more work to localize anime this way, and a real differentiator, since it’s simply impossible for competitors to do. For the other major streaming services, subtitle files are fitted to the most universal standard across dozens of different apps and devices. With anime making up just 4-5% of Netflix viewership and an even smaller share of Hulu/Disney/Prime Video, they’re simply not going to optimize the viewing experience towards anime.
But if you look at the second example, from A Gatherer’s Adventure in Isekai, you can see that Crunchyroll is now taking a cue from Netflix. I reviewed each of the currently-released fall simulcasts available as of writing, and each of them has adopted this style. There’s never more than two lines of text on the screen at once. No longer are different characters using the top of the screen to communicate when a different speaker is also talking. And only the most minimal signage and on-screen text is translated, often at the expense of reading the previous line of dialogue, which gets cut off early.
It’s important to note that Crunchyroll does not localize all the content they distribute on the platform themselves. Nor does Crunchyroll seem to set any high standards for delivered subtitle files from their partners. From our research, prior to this season, Crunchyroll was localizing about 70% of their new releases in English using their in-house team, with partners like Toei Animation and Aniplex of America providing their own subtitle files for their series. You can usually tell visually when Crunchyroll produced the subtitles for an episode by the font used.
Typesetting the Table
If you want to legally watch anime outside of Asia, Crunchyroll is generally your best bet. Most anime have exclusive streaming licenses, so for ~70% of 2025’s new releases, and an even larger share of catalog shows and movies, Crunchyroll is often your only means to do so.
But that’s not an issue. Netflix may have a more advanced recommendation and video compression algorithms than Crunchyroll, but Crunchyroll’s video quality is often higher, especially on a desktop computer, where anime is disproportionately viewed. Not only does Crunchyroll have significantly more anime than all of its competitors combined in every country outside of Asia, but because of its single-minded focus on anime, Crunchyroll offers some benefits for viewing the medium.
Typesetting is one of the most notable benefits Crunchyroll provides the median anime viewer. Typesetting ensures that on-screen text, signs, and other elements are localized in a way that feels like part of the show. Even the most basic efforts from Crunchyroll improve the experience compared to that of its peers:
This isn’t to say that Crunchyroll is perfect in this regard, not by any stretch. Many fans, including myself, were spoiled by over-the-top fansubs from the mid-00s to the middle of the ‘10s, when fan groups would make efforts to time novel visual elements of the subtitles to attack names, and provide karaoke effects for openings and endings. To be clear, this wasn’t the norm in the fansub era of anime, but it was common enough, particularly on the more popular titles. Today, we’re lucky if the opening and ending sequence are translated at all, even on Crunchyroll.
However, for the last 19 years, Crunchyroll has generally leaned towards these fan expectations when it comes to localization. In nearly a dozen languages, you’ll find signs properly translated and labeled, and be able to follow the conversation, even when characters are talking over one another. And no other major streaming company does this.
For example, in Komi Can’t Communicate one of the principal characters typically converses via written language, and there are frequently fast-paced conversations. But since this title is on Netflix, this means the subtitles don’t have “room” to translate critical text. Let’s compare how Netflix does it to what was previously Crunchyroll’s standard:
One of the biggest challenges when watching anime outside of Japan is that most people outside of Japan do not speak Japanese, and thus rely on subtitles, dubs, and typesetting to help them understand the piece of media they’re watching. As we saw above, if you do not speak Japanese, you’re unlikely to comprehend the joke in Komi Can’t Communicate. However, in Crunchyroll’s release of My Dress-Up Darling shown above, you can both follow the character’s narration, as well as follow what’s being written on the chalkboard.
Since its inception, Crunchyroll’s localization team has used a free program called Aegisub to create subtitles and on-screen text translations. The tool is incredibly flexible, allowing for a greater variety of fonts, unicode characters, and simultaneous elements that can move independently. You can use multiple fonts, colors, and effects active at the same time to provide greater clarity to the viewer.
This is all impossible for Netflix, Disney, and the like. But as of now, it seems like it may be the case for Crunchyroll, too. As of today, we’ve seen rumors that Crunchyroll has forced its team off of Aegisub.
While this rumor has not been substantiated by an independent third party as of writing, it makes sense with what we’re seeing in new season releases, and with other recent news. Crunchyroll’s major layoff just two months ago, during which most of their operations team was unceremoniously let go, included some of the longest-serving Crunchyrollers, adding up to a combined total of around 100 years of service to the company by my calculations. Is a new subcontractor and/or service the replacement? It seems that way to me.
So what?
If this is indeed the case, let’s try to see why Crunchyroll would do this. Here are a few possible explanations:
Crunchyroll sub-licenses a lot of content. If you look at Netflix’s most-watched anime of the year so far, a lot of it comes from Crunchyroll, like Solo Leveling and Mashle: Magic and Muscles. If you’re Crunchyroll, it’s easier to make just one version of the subtitles, than to have a Crunchyroll-specific one and another that you send out for ingestion for “Crunchyroll on Prime Video” and “Crunchyroll on YouTube.”
It’s a lot of work. Every member of the Crunchyroll localization team I’ve ever talked to or worked with is obsessive about anime and anime culture, and wants to make the anime watching experience the best it could be, no matter what. But hey, if you’re Crunchyroll and you’re trying to offload localization work to less specialized contractors who are typically not trained to use Aegisub or engage in moderate typesetting, you might see it as a cost-cutting measure to stop doing it. (The jury is still out if it actually would do that, though.)
From a product development standpoint, it’s easier to use industry standards for this sort of thing. It’s rough to be the only major streaming service to care about typesetting. And extremely expensive to re-encode each language’s video files!
But here’s the thing: if Crunchyroll has indeed changed its standards, there’s now zero major streaming services that care about typesetting. Crunchyroll is supposed to be the “fan-first” service, something their leadership likes to highlight wherever possible. But between this and last year’s removal of comments (including excising years of previous comments), their product road map suggests they are anything but fan-focused.
I don’t believe this is going to lead to a noticeable rise in piracy or anything, to be clear. And even then, it would not be much of a statement. The supermajority of people who pirate anime watch on bootleg streaming sites, which use rips of official releases from places like Crunchyroll at a rate of over 95%. The most popular “fansub” group in 2025 by every available metric is “SubsPlease”, which, again, is just Crunchyroll rips. Outside of a few notable exceptions, our research does not see pirate behavior actually behave as if it’s in response to a service problem. This is all to say: if Crunchyroll stops doing typesetting work, for most anime, it will simply cease to exist. The viewing experience for the typical anime fan will go down.
But when anime piracy makes up “nearly 28% of TV piracy,” according to research by Muso, it’s a much more normal behavior, and makes bootleg streaming sites seem a more viable replacement good. This kind of anti-customer behavior will be seen as validation by the pro-piracy crowd. Anime is disproportionately pirated to a large degree primarily because of ease and inertia, but anything that justifies the behavior is celebrated and repeated ad-nauseum. And I don’t really understand why Crunchyroll seems so eager to give piracy this easy win.
If Crunchyroll suddenly reverts to their previous subtitling practices, most of this article can be disregarded. But if not, we lose something small but important to anime as a medium in exchange for a marginal benefit to Crunchyroll’s coffers.
Edited and produced by Klaudia Amenábar, Chloe Catoya, Leah Tahmassian, & Malu Arantes.
Written by Miles Atherton, Leah Tahmassian, Klaudia Amenábar, & Chloe Catoya.
Presented by White Box Entertainment.
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When will corporations stop ruining things for fans?