“Solo Leveling” just had its best two weeks of the year, and neither headline is about the show currently airing. Season 2 of the Korean webtoon-turned-anime juggernaut took home two trophies at the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards in Tokyo, marking its second consecutive year on the winners’ stage — and days before that ceremony’s coverage even finished circulating, publisher D&C Media used its own earnings call to confirm a Season 3 is already in production. Together, the two pieces of news read either as proof that Korea’s webtoon-to-anime pipeline has matured into a genuinely durable global export engine, or as a reminder of how completely the industry’s anime ambitions now ride on a single IP.
The awards came first. Per Seoul Shinmun reporter Yang Seung-hyun’s May 27 report, “Solo Leveling Season 2 -Arise from the Shadow-” won “Best Animation” and “Best Action” at the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards, held in Tokyo on May 23. Crunchyroll’s awards — run annually since 2017 and decided by a 70% critics’ panel vote and 30% fan vote — are widely described in Korean coverage as anime’s answer to the Oscars. This is the franchise’s second straight year on the podium: it won the ceremony’s top prize, “Anime of the Year,” in 2025. D&C Media CEO Choi Won-young, quoted in the same report, called the win proof that “Korean content’s power” translates globally and pledged to “accelerate the expansion of the global IP.”
Then came the production news. Per Gametoc reporter Moon Won-bin’s June 10 report, D&C Media confirmed during its earnings presentation that a third season of the anime is in production, targeting a 2027–2028 broadcast window, with Japan’s A-1 Pictures — the studio behind both prior seasons — continuing as producer. Season 2 closed with protagonist Sung Jin-woo retaking Jeju Island and founding the Ahjin Guild as the story’s ruling “Monarchs” began to surface; Season 3 is expected to dig into the secrets of the System that powers Jin-woo’s growth and escalate the confrontation with those Monarchs. The underlying webtoon and web novel, by writer Chugong and illustrator Dubu of Redice Studio, has passed a cumulative 14.3 billion views worldwide, by D&C Media’s own count.
The optimistic read is that this is exactly the success story the Korean content industry has spent a decade trying to manufacture: a homegrown web novel becomes a webtoon, the webtoon becomes an internationally co-produced anime, and the anime then wins the genre’s most-watched awards show two years running against a field still dominated by Japanese-native IP. That’s not a fluke — it’s a release a 2021 government Content Award, two consecutive Piccoma “Webtoon of the Year” wins in Japan, a successful Netmarble game spinoff, and now back-to-back Crunchyroll wins, each stage validating the next. For an industry built on proving that Korean-origin IP can carry a full anime production rather than just license a character design, that’s about as strong a data point as exists right now.
The more skeptical read is in the timeline itself. Season 3 isn’t arriving next year, or the year after — D&C Media’s own target is 2027 to 2028, meaning the franchise that just won “Best Animation” will likely spend close to two more years off-air before its next episode airs at all. That gap, paired with a publisher whose current roadmap leans on one IP across a game, a sequel web novel (“Solo Leveling: Ragnarok”), and now a third anime season, raises the same question that’s followed Korean variety and film stories all year: is this a pipeline turning out repeatable global hits, or one extraordinarily bankable franchise being stretched as far as it can go while the next one waits in line behind it?
Sources: Yang Seung-hyun, “디앤씨미디어 ‘나 혼자만 레벨업’, 2026 크런치롤 애니 어워즈 2관왕,” Seoul Shinmun, May 27, 2026. Moon Won-bin, “나혼렙 애니 3기 제작 확정됐다,” Gametoc, June 10, 2026.
