Anime Removed by Crunchyroll Hits New Milestone

Crunchyroll is routinely thought of by many as the “anime streaming service,” with the platform routinely being the exclusive platform for many franchises that make their way from Japan to the United States. Unfortunately, this prestigious title doesn’t mean that Crunchyroll is able to entirely avoid drama. While the streaming service welcomed back the cult-classic anime 86 to its roster, another major franchise recently lost its place on the platform’s roster. Despite this, the anime franchise has hit a major milestone as its story continues to play out in the pages of Black Lagoon’s manga.

For those who might not know, Crunchyroll removed Black Lagoon’s anime from its platform last month. While an official reason wasn’t shared, the Madhouse anime adaptation was noticed as missing by many fans, as its three-season run cannot be found on any streaming service. Despite this anime roadblock, the manga is still hitting new heights regardless of its television show’s absence. Black Lagoon’s original manga, along with its spin-offs, has reached ten million copies in circulation since it first debuted in 2002. While ten million might not be the same number as the likes of One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen, it’s a respectable outing for a long-running franchise all the same.

Black Lagoon’s Future

Creator Rei Hiroe has continued releasing new chapters of Black Lagoon to this day, even almost twenty-five years since its first chapter’s release. Unfortunately, the mangaka was struggling with real-world issues that have caused major hiatuses in the manga’s release. In response to the infrequent release schedule, Hiroe shared with fans worldwide the personal struggle he had with his own depression while warning fans to take care of their mental health, using himself as an example.

Last year, “There’s a tweet going around saying that if you get depressed, you’ll waste 10 years of your life, but I seriously couldn’t recover and forced myself to serialize irregularly, and it took me 4 years to publish one volume, and I still panic when there’s a tight deadline, so I can’t write unless I have a huge buffer, so as a serialized manga artist, I haven’t recovered from that half-dead state, so please be careful.”

The latest chapter of the manga series was released in May of this year, and while the printed story is showing no signs of stopping, the anime adaptation is a different matter. Studio Madhouse took the reins of the initial series, giving viewers twenty-nine episodes as part of the main series. Despite the manga continuing, no new anime projects have been confirmed by Madhouse or any other production house. Hopefully, at some point in the future, the Black Lagoon universe will once again find itself on the screen.

Crunchyroll Removes Legendary Anime Series