UPDATE 9/1: Per our insiders, the booking is about Gunn’s post-DC future: the anime audience is “a pillar of the global audience,” and his DC contract expires in 2027 with no new extension.
UPDATE 8/28: The one name the anime crowd gave a pass to is out. Guillermo del Toro says he is not attending the forum — “Not me. No voy.” — which leaves James Gunn at the top of the bill.
“Leave the anime to the Japanese thanks.”
That is the most-liked response on X to Crunchyroll’s announcement that James Gunn will speak at its first Anime Future Forum, and it sums up the three days since.
Crunchyroll announced Monday that Gunn and Guillermo del Toro will headline the invite-only summit October 7 at New York’s Javits Center, one day before New York Comic Con opens in the same building, alongside executives from MAPPA, Toho, Shueisha and Aniplex and Sony’s top brass.
The anime crowd’s answer has been a wall of quote-tweets telling Hollywood, and Gunn in particular, to stay home.
Kudasai, one of the biggest Spanish-language anime news outlets, summed it up in a post that pulled 738 likes and 33,000 views in a matter of hours: the lineup “unleashed a wave of panic and outrage,” the community went after the DC director in particular and demanded he stay away from Japanese properties, and del Toro got the warmer reception because of his well-known respect for manga.
The fear underneath it, per Kudasai: that this summit is the start of Western corporations imposing censorship and softening on Japanese content to fit the American market.
Gunn Catches It, Del Toro Doesn’t
The Hollywood Reporter’s announcement post is where the pile-on happened.
It sits at 1000 likes against 230 re-posts and 222 replies, with roughly 385,000 views.
The “leave the anime to the Japanese” reply is at roughly 1.1k likes, more than four times THR’s own post.
A second post accusing Sony of selling out and telling Hollywood to stay out of Japan passed 870 likes. A third post mocking the Hollywood guests as “woke” cleared 760.
The split between the two directors is the part worth paying attention to.
Del Toro has decades of receipts. Pacific Rim was built as a love letter to kaiju and mecha anime, he spent years trying to get Naoki Urasawa’s Monster made as an HBO series, and he brings up Satoshi Kon and Hayao Miyazaki in interview after interview.
Anime fans have watched him do this their whole lives, so his name on the bill reads as a fan getting a seat.
Gunn’s name reads as DC Studios getting a seat.
Gunn has his own anime answers on the record. Asked on Threads in 2024 which anime he likes, he listed Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, A Silent Voice, Perfect Blue and Paprika, and he has credited Ultraman and Kamen Rider for the tone of The Suicide Squad.
None of it bought him anything this week. The fans venting aren’t rating his taste. They are rating what he represents: the co-CEO of a Hollywood studio walking into a room Sony built to sign up “potential new partners and allies” for its anime business.
Also, don’t forget Gunn’s Superman bombed overseas. It also didn’t help when Gunn insulted the huge audience in India. Supergirl followed suit, especially in China.
Why The Anime Crowd Reacts This Way
The recurring word in the replies is Americanization: the worry that Sony and its Hollywood partners will sand down what makes anime anime to fit U.S. tastes, whether through content rules, softer adaptations or a sanitized “global” version of the medium.
Fans didn’t invent that from nothing.
Hollywood’s live-action record with Japanese properties is Dragonball Evolution, Ghost in the Shell, Netflix’s Death Note and a Cowboy Bebop Netflix canceled after one season.
Sony has been here before, too.
Several replies compared the forum to PlayStation, which took years of “censorship” complaints from Japanese developers and their fans after the division, run out of California since 2016, began applying its own content guidelines to Japanese games in 2018.
And Crunchyroll’s own goodwill is thin. It deleted its comment sections in 2024, and last summer subscribers caught it shipping AI-generated subtitles with a “ChatGPT said” line left in.
Then there is what the forum actually is. By Crunchyroll’s own description, it is a business summit: “the first and only” industry event outside Japan with anime front and center, built to pull “potential new partners and allies” into Sony’s ecosystem. More than 400 executives and creators, invite-only, no fans.
The audience that keeps the medium alive is watching a room it can’t enter fill up with the people it trusts least, and reacting accordingly.
The Room Gunn Picked Over Man of Tomorrow
As we noted Monday, Gunn cleared a day in New York for Crunchyroll and none for Man of Tomorrow.
DC Studios still has no panel on the NYCC schedule. DC’s four panels are all comics. Man of Tomorrow opens July 9, 2027, and per our insiders it is being built as Gunn’s farewell, with his DC deal running into spring 2027.
So the co-CEO of DC Studios is spending NYCC week keynoting for Sony, and the audience Sony is courting is telling Sony he is the problem.
DC does have an anime coming. Joker: Laugh Riot, from Japan’s SOLA Entertainment and director Yasuhiro Aoki, was greenlit at Annecy in June. Peter Safran announced it, not Gunn, and Crunchyroll still hasn’t said what Gunn will talk about on October 7. Oh, and the head of WB Animation just exited.
Whatever it is, he will be saying it to 400 executives. The fans already gave their answer, and it was seven words.
