Netflix & Crunchyroll to Stream Shonen Jump’s Spring 2025 Hit

You can watch this witch everywhere.

January 23, 2025, 5:52pm

Crunchyroll/Netflix

Netflix and Crunchyroll will be sharing streaming custody of one of the most hotly anticipated spring animes. The popular Witch Watch manga will be getting an anime adaptation released in April, with both Netflix and Crunchyroll announcing the upcoming series will be making its way to their streaming service. The anime series was previously announced in December 2024 and will run for two continuous cours. There will also be a theatrical Witch Watch: Watch Party hosted by GKIDS for North American screenings starting in mid-March. Witch Watch is one of Shueisha’s most successful romantic fantasy manga for the Jump Comics Imprint.

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The Witch Watch manga follows the adventures of a teenage witch named Nico Wakatsuki, who must return home under the protection of her human-looking ogre familiar, Morihito Otogi. Nico and Morihito are childhood friends, with Nico holding onto a crush on him. Now that the pair live under the same roof, they try navigating their lives while dealing with supernatural hijinks and awkward romantic tension. The series proved to be a hit for Jump Comics, becoming one of the more popular Shoujo manga. The Witch Watch has 20 volumes in circulation and has sold over 1 million copies cumulative. Bibury Animation Studios, the same company behind the The Quintessential Quintuplets sequels, is producing the anime adaptation for Witch Watch.

Will Witch Watch Be Part of a Licensing War Between Netflix and Crunchyroll?

Multiple anime have cross-over between different streaming services. Typically, it’s up to the rights owners and creators who determine what services they want their products to appear in. Rights owners usually auction off licensing to the highest bidder, but sometimes rights owners would sell their series to more than one streaming service. Some of the bigger streaming brands like Netflix would often negotiate for exclusive streaming rights for some of the biggest animes, yet, often or not, several streamers would play ball and allow an anime to run on more than one service. For example, last fall’s hit, Dandadan, launched on both Netflix and Crunchyroll.

However, anime is set to become the next big thing in entertainment media in 2025, meaning the fight for anime exclusivity will intensify. Bloomberg reports that Crunchyroll chose to roll back the promotion of Dandadan for unspecified reasons, with Screen Rant speculating it is because the series was airing on Netflix at the time. Witch Watch is expected to be another anime blockbuster for streaming, possibly leading it to become part of the same licensing war that hindered Dandadan. Netflix and Crunchyroll have shared anime amicably beforehand, including the mega-hit One Piece franchise. The Witch Watch may skirt past the licensing issues and become popular on both Netflix and Crunchyroll.