Since there's a very real chance that this lawsuit could wreck Funimation beyond any hope of recovery, I've thought a lot about who could replace Funimation as the industry leader.
Right now the big companies in the anime industry in North America are Funimation, Viz Media, Aniplex, and Sentai Filmworks.
There's also the smaller companies of Media Blasters, Right Stuff, and Discotek, but they're pretty much irrelevant in this conversation for a variety of reasons.
Discotek Media doesn't make new dubs, they just re-license and redistribute old stuff that has gone out of print.
Media Blasters and Right Stuff are essentially living fossils from the old days, but they aren't major players anymore and haven't done much since the late 2000's. They just haven't gone under like a lot of their 90's contemporaries and mostly just skate by because they hold licenses to a lot of old properties that the other companies don't want anymore.
Funimation only became the biggest fish in the small pond entirely due to the fact that the Great Recession at the end of the 2000's hit the anime industry pretty hard and took down a lot of the old "big dogs" of the 1990's like ADV, Geneon, and Central Park Media and reduced several other old guard companies like Media Blasters and Right Stuff to becoming mere shells of what they once were. 4Kids survived the recession, but went into a severe decline a few years later.
Funimation, Viz, and Aniplex were really all that was left because most of them had the licenses to the anime that were in vogue at the time, chiefly the anime that aired on Adult Swim and the OG Toonami back in the day.
Viz has Naruto and Bleach, which were arguably the two most popular shows in the anime fandom during the late 2000's and they also had the license to InuYasha, which was one of the heavy-hitters in the mid-2000's.
Having the licenses to those shows are probably what saved Viz during that time. Since then they hit nostalgia paydirt by getting the license to Sailor Moon in 2014, so they'll be doing fine.
Funimation also produced a lot of the hit anime dubs that aired on Adult Swim such as Fullmetal Alchemist and bought the licenses to a lot of the Geneon dubs that were popular on Adult Swim, Toonami, and Sci-Fi Channel back in the day.
Funimation has a knack for grabbing onto the next big thing in the fandom, and most of the big flavor-of-the-month anime hits of the 2010's have been dubbed and distributed by Funimation such as Hetalia, Attack On Titan, My Hero Academia, and so on.
However, as we've found out, Funi is getting woke and it will probably make them go broke. As far as I know, none of the other major companies (Viz, Aniplex, Sentai) have blacklisted Vic nor have they made any comments on the issue.
The only ones who are involved in this mess are Funimation and Rooster Teeth.
Rooster Teeth is a bush league YouTuber company who are fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, so it's likely that they'll collapse due to their own folly whether or not Vic decides to go after them in court.
But Funimation is being dragged into a legal battle that could easily end them.
Even if Vic doesn't bankrupt them in the lawsuit, the Kick Vic campaign has gone haywire and is becoming a nightmare for the company in terms of PR, and we haven't even gotten to the actual lawsuit yet.
It's quite possible that Sony will simply dissolve Funimation and tell the main architects of the Kick Vic debacle to take a hike, then merge all of Funimation's remaining valuable assets with Aniplex or some other replacement company.
Depending on how things play out in court and what Sony's main course of action is, it's very likely that Viz Media will be the new top dog in the anime distribution industry or Aniplex will do to Funimation what Funi did to a lot of the old Geneon licenses when they went under.
