It’s starting to look like we’re seeing a little bit of corporate negotiating going on in the public sphere this week. After the Answerman column this week that we talked about here, FUNimation has now come out publicly to talk about what’s going on from their point of view.
“We’ve been getting a lot of questions today regarding the Anime News Network Answerman column, where Justin Sevakis states that Crunchyroll holds the home video rights for Free! Season 1. We know that many of you fans have been very curious about the home video rights situation, ever since our initial announcement of the simulcast of season 2 (Free! -Eternal Summer-).
We would absolutely love to make an English dub for season 1 and distribute it on home video, and we would be more than happy to work with Crunchyroll to make it happen. We have reached out to Crunchyroll to see if they would be interested in collaborating on this release; however, we have not heard back yet. Stay tuned for future developments though—we’re excited to report that we will be announcing the dub cast for season 2 very soon.”
Crunchyroll themselves have not stated anything as of this writing, so it’ll be interesting to see if they deal with this behind the scenes or put something out publicly. While FUNimation’s statement is by no means a forceful one, it’s one that does put the pressure on Crunchyroll as the ball is essentially in their court now.
