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A Three-Way Co-Production Announced at New York Comic Con
LINE Digital Frontier (LDF), the Japanese subsidiary of Webtoon Entertainment (Naver Webtoon’s parent company), is teaming up with Japanese animation studio Hayate and streaming platform Crunchyroll to adapt around 15 webtoons into anime. The three companies announced the co-production partnership during the Crunchyroll showcase at New York Comic Con on October 8, 2026. The deal connects original Korean webtoons with Japanese production expertise and a global streaming network.
According to Animation World Network, the three companies will work together from the earliest stages of development. Hayate will lead development and production, while Crunchyroll will stream the finished series exclusively in select regions. Rather than just trading distribution rights for completed shows, this links production and distribution from the very start of turning a comic into a screen adaptation.
The announcement named three specific titles: Remarried Empress, Teenage Mercenary, and The Boxer, all available through LDF’s mobile apps. The figure of roughly 15 titles describes the scale of the partnership overall. Not all of them are finished or set to premiere at the same time; the three named titles are simply the first ones confirmed from a larger development slate.
The Massive Readership Behind the Leading Titles
Remarried Empress has a global cumulative view count approaching 3 billion. Figures reported by Inven, based on Naver Webtoon data, put the number at 2.97 billion. Teenage Mercenary sits at 2.84 billion, and The Boxer has crossed 1.06 billion. Since view counts track total reads over time, they shouldn’t be read as the exact number of unique readers.
What the numbers show is that a sustained audience had already formed long before a single frame of animation was drawn. Anime introduces these stories to new viewers, but each one launches with a built-in fanbase already in place. That doesn’t guarantee the anime will match the webtoon’s popularity; translating a story’s appeal across different mediums is its own separate challenge.
The anime adaptation of Remarried Empress involves studio TROYCA. There’s a distinction between Hayate leading the overall development and production of the partnership, and the individual studios credited for specific shows. The co-production alliance functions as the framework for selecting source material and driving projects forward; separate studios can still handle the actual animation work for each title.
Bridging Korean Stories, Japanese Production, and Global Streaming
Hayate is a Tokyo-based animation studio established in 2025 through a joint investment by Aniplex and Crunchyroll. This partnership brings together a Japanese subsidiary that distributes Korean webtoons, a Japanese anime studio, and a global streaming platform in one project. It shows how content now moves across borders: the market where a story originates, the place where it’s animated, and the audience that watches the finished product don’t have to be the same.
Korean content companies often describe this as “one source, multi-use,” the practice of adapting a single IP across different media formats. Turning webtoons into anime fits that pattern. It’s more than translating a story into another language; it rebuilds a world once told through still panels and text into a medium with motion, voice acting, and sound.
For international audiences, this changes how they might first encounter Korean stories. Someone who has never opened a webtoon app could discover these titles through anime streaming instead. Crunchyroll’s exclusive rights, though, only cover select regions. The announcement doesn’t promise the same availability everywhere, and release details will vary by territory.
A Development Alliance Beyond Simple Rights Trading
At the announcement, LDF CEO Hiroshi Mori pointed to the cultural reach Japanese anime has built with audiences worldwide. He said the partnership would let webtoon originals reach Japanese and international fans in a new format. His comments addressed both the existing webtoon readership and the broader anime fan community.
The news isn’t just about a handful of popular comics getting screen adaptations. The scale and method matter more: all three companies are collaborating on roughly 15 titles starting from the development stage, building a pipeline that connects source material, animation production, and global streaming. Korean webtoons’ expansion abroad is moving beyond translation deals into production partnerships built from the ground up.
What’s confirmed so far is limited to the roles of the three companies and the three flagship titles; the rest of the roughly 15-title slate hasn’t been disclosed. This isn’t the launch of a finished batch of shows. It’s better understood as a long-term plan to combine Korean source material with Japanese production and global distribution.
Source: Press release on the Hayate, LINE Digital Frontier, and Crunchyroll co-production published via Anime News Network, October 9, 2026; Animation World Network, October 9, 2026; Inven reporting based on Naver Webtoon data, accessed October 13, 2026.
