Crunchyroll Cultivates a Streaming Community With a Novel Idea: Film Screens

Different streaming services have different attitudes toward “the theatrical experience.” Netflix claims not to be against it, but many cinephiles argue that the service is selective to the point of withholding. The company is clearly reluctant to theatrically distribute its original movies. On the other hand, Amazon seems to be moving toward making a traditional theatrical distribution arm a part of its motion-picture production endeavor.

Streaming services that specialize in genre are highly invested in the communities that attach to them. Recently they’ve been experimenting with enticing their audiences the old-fashioned way, by showing their programs in movie theaters before offering them on their sites.

In July, the horror site Shudder showed its new original film “Kuso,” the debut feature from Steven Ellison, known as the musician Flying Lotus, in special screenings at the Nitehawk in Brooklyn and Cinefamily in Los Angeles, two venues known for forward-thinking programming.

That same month, Crunchyroll, the streaming service devoted to Japanese animation, with a strong suit in “simulcasting” anime programs soon after their TV airings in Japan, hosted its second Crunchyroll Movie Night in 300 movie theaters across the United States.

I attended the event at the 25-screen AMC Empire multiplex in Manhattan. The Crunchyroll YouTube Channel and podcast personalities Victoria Holden and Reina Scully introduced the program in a taped segment. Things kicked off with a behind-the-scenes look at “Children of Ether,” a Crunchyroll original project bringing American and Japanese artistic talent together: the creator LeSean Thomas, who has credits on the American animated series “Black Dynamite” and “The Boondocks,” and the prolific Japanese animator Hiroshi Shimizu.

The series is a sci-fi adventure set in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic Manhattan; the intriguing preview footage was followed by three episodes of “The Ancient Magus’ Bride,” an adaptation of the popular manga created in 2014 by Kore Yamazaki. Both “Ether” and “Bride” are, like many anime movies and shows, fantasy stories featuring young protagonists who possess powers they are initially ignorant of and have trouble controlling. (See the character Tetsuo in the classic 1988 anime feature “Akira,” which was also adapted from a manga.)

The 370-seat AMC Empire was about three-quarters full by the time the lights went down, and sitting through Crunchyroll Movie Night was very distinct from almost every other public film screening I’ve been to in the past decade or even more. For most of the screening, except for the soundtrack of the show itself, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

“Bride” has what you might call a humdinger of a premise: It begins with a teenage girl, Chise, in chains, being sold as a slave to a very tall individual with a human body and an antelope’s skull and horns for a head. This character is a magus, and he sees in Chise what others do not — that she possesses great magical power.

The initial episodes have the magus protecting Chise from impish fairies, taking her to a dragon-populated Iceland and introducing her to colleagues in the magic arts. The series follows a convention common in manga: When the characters are angry, or act awkwardly, or crack bad jokes, they are rendered as caricatures of themselves. These provided the laughs in the story, and the audience at Crunchyroll Movie Night responded with enthusiastic good humor. Otherwise, attentive silence.

A couple of days before the event, Crunchyroll’s chief executive, Colin Decker, told me that the site was created in 2006 by American software engineers who were also anime fans, and who wanted to create a way to access brand-new anime from Japan without resorting to piracy.

Now, he said, Crunchyoll is the “largest international distributor of anime.” The site-app has more than one million paid subscribers and over 20 million registered users. A good deal of its content can be accessed for free, with ads, and at a resolution of 480p; there are two levels of premium subscriptions, one for $6.95 a month and another at $11.95, both of which eliminate ads and feature high-definition 720p and 1080p.

The simulcasting model is currently the most vibrant part of Crunchyroll’s programming, and getting the material out as quickly as possible for the international audience is a challenge. But fans have turned out to be a big help, Mr. Decker said.

“We reached out to fans and found many of our subtitling people from the fan community, and they make sure the translations are as accurate as possible, and that titling is done as quickly as possible.” That translation is a tall order for a site that subtitles its content in seven languages (and two dialects of Spanish).

While I was interested in the site’s Movie Night initiative, I was also curious about whether Crunchyroll would add more feature-film fare, particularly classic anime, to the site. Mr. Decker, who once taught film at Harvard, said that “historical material is something I’m very interested in.”

“We’re looking at producing some documentaries about landmarks in anime,” he continued. “We’re constantly looking around and saying ‘Someone’s got to do this!,’ and then it turns out that someone has to be us.”

One of the things Crunchyroll has done is initiate an Anime Awards poll. (Last year, the Anime of the Year was “Yuri!!! on ICE,” about a young Japanese figure skater, which is as lively as its title’s spelling suggests.) Although the ratio of feature films to simulcasts and archived series is pretty low at the moment, Crunchyroll is an eye-opening streaming experience, and a great way to stay current on trends and innovations in anime.

As for Crunchyroll Movie Night, Mr. Decker said that the service doesn’t have ambitions for certain kinds of expansion. “We are not getting into theatrical distribution,” he said emphatically — as if pre-emptively dodging a bullet.

It’s Crunchyroll’s scale — big, but not too big, like that of Shudder — as well as its genre specialization that enables it to address its subscribers as a community rather than as a market. Which is why you’ll probably never see Netflix Movie Night.