There’s been a lot of exciting One-Punch Man news recently. Season 3 is on its way—eventually. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the Hollywood adaption recently announced that Dan Harmon and Heather Anne Campbell have come on as writers.
One-Punch Man‘s anime has effectively seemed dormant since its second season aired five years ago. With all this newfound activity and hype, it makes sense that you’d want to revisit the series. It’s been a hot second since you’ve been entertained by the tale of Saitama, Tokyo’s most absurdly overpowered hero.
So you log onto Crunchyroll, which has far more anime series than any other streamer in North America. Surely, they must have One-Punch Man. And yet, when you search for it … it’s not there.
It feels like a bizarre glitch. You even vaguely remember watching One-Punch Man on Crunchyroll before. Why isn’t it there? When did this happen? And if you can’t watch One-Punch Man on Crunchyroll, where can you find it?
A hypothesis for One-Punch Man‘s disappearance from Crunchyroll
In this increasingly dystopian streaming landscape we are forced to inhabit, series come and go from services all the time. Sometimes, they were licensed to exist by that very service, and their removal means that they become dead media, since their licensor won’t agree to release a freaking Blu-Ray or something. That’s the worst-case scenario.
Fortunately, that’s not the case with Crunchyroll and One-Punch Man. This seems to simply be the more common phenomenon of a streamer’s license to a show on their platform expiring. When that license expires, the show is taken off the platform.
But, confusingly, the license may not expire in every market in which the streamer exists. Crunchyroll still has the license to One-Punch Man in France and the U.K., for example. That’s probably why the page for One-Punch Man still technically exists for Crunchyroll users in the U.S.A. and Canada. It’s just devoid of episodes.
The One-Punch Man scenario seems tied to a bunch of VIZ shows leaving Crunchyroll about a year ago. This exodus wasn’t announced; it just kind of happened. Other prominent licenses lost around the same time include Inuyasha, several Naruto and Naruto Shippuden films, and K.
The possibly good news is that there’s exactly one place where North Americans can still watch One-Punch Man: Hulu. If you don’t subscribe to Hulu … that’s definitely bad news.
