Further Anime Company Drama!
Sep. 27th, 2007 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNot even a week ago, I made some idle comments on the sudden, surprising cancellation of an impending deal for one North American anime releasing company, ADV Films, to take over the marketing and distribution of another, Geneon, and wrapped up with the comment that I didn't really know how to solve what seemed the larger issues that this reflected on. It seems, though, that the Japanese company Geneon is a subsidiary of had their own solution of how to solve the particular issue: in a matter of months, Geneon will stop taking orders and close up shop. Maybe I'm not as worked up over it as I've seen some other anime fans seem to be, but again, it's a bit of a shock, and even possible to let imagination spin out of control to paint a doom-laden scenario of the whole North American anime industry unravelling.
I had reflected on how Geneon didn't seem to have had any really standout titles of late, seeming to try and rely instead on a collection of releases that might please slices of committed and vocal anime fans but which don't seem to add up to widespread sales. I can look back at what I've been purchasing over the past few years, and contemplate that I would hear about this title or that title Geneon was releasing and conclude "It's not for me"... although I'd perhaps been getting a bit more from them of late, some of which have indeed fallen into my "memorable" category, and not all of it through back-catalogue sales (some of which dated back from the days when "Geneon" was "Pioneer"). Having commented a little before on the anime series Zipang, I'm reasonably grateful the last volume of it should slip through just weeks before the big cutoff. There were also series I'd heard interesting message-board "buzz" about not quite in time to start preordering them from the beginning, but leaving me with the sense that I could easily pick them up some time in the future... so now, of course, there's the question of whether or not I should rush out in a panic and buy them up while I still can. I did do a little of that last year when a different anime company had to file for bankruptcy, only to still have those DVDs in my "backlog"...
I had reflected on how Geneon didn't seem to have had any really standout titles of late, seeming to try and rely instead on a collection of releases that might please slices of committed and vocal anime fans but which don't seem to add up to widespread sales. I can look back at what I've been purchasing over the past few years, and contemplate that I would hear about this title or that title Geneon was releasing and conclude "It's not for me"... although I'd perhaps been getting a bit more from them of late, some of which have indeed fallen into my "memorable" category, and not all of it through back-catalogue sales (some of which dated back from the days when "Geneon" was "Pioneer"). Having commented a little before on the anime series Zipang, I'm reasonably grateful the last volume of it should slip through just weeks before the big cutoff. There were also series I'd heard interesting message-board "buzz" about not quite in time to start preordering them from the beginning, but leaving me with the sense that I could easily pick them up some time in the future... so now, of course, there's the question of whether or not I should rush out in a panic and buy them up while I still can. I did do a little of that last year when a different anime company had to file for bankruptcy, only to still have those DVDs in my "backlog"...