Sony-owned anime streaming platform Crunchyroll has laid off a reported 85 staff at different branches around the world. The redundancies affected Crunchyroll’s offices in Australia, as well as the United States, Moldova, France, and Germany. The vast majority of redundancies appear to have come from the company’s various marketing and engineering departments.
Crunchyroll provided Kotaku Australia with a copy of president Rahul Purini’s note to staff advising of the redundancies. Purini’s email cites last year’s merging of Funimation and Crunchyroll as the driving factor behind the redundancies. The lay-offs were not made out of a desire to save costs; rather, the company seems to be moving to cut redundant roles following the merger. According to reporting from Anime News Network, it is understood that Crunchyroll management informed staff at an all-hands meeting today that those made redundant will retain their full staff benefits throughout the severance period.
Redundancy messages from Australian staff have been filtering onto social media over the last couple of hours, reconfirming that local marketing staff were indeed affected.
Crunchyroll’s Australian presence was formerly known as Madman Entertainment. Madman, and its parent company Funimation, rebranded in 2022.
Crunchyroll’s local office last year staged the inaugural Crunchyroll Expo Australia in Melbourne. The show was itself a rebrand of the Madman Anime Festival (colloquially known as MadFest). Despite venue capacity restrictions at the MCEC creating queueing chaos on the show’s first day (and some truly inclement weather even by Melbourne standards), the show went on to have a comparitively successful Sunday. At the time of writing, no 2023 dates for the convention have been announced.
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