While the disbanding of Bandai Entertainment’s Anime and Manga branch will not affect any licenses or distribution rights which I believe some people are worried about, this has resulted in a few shakeups in terms of Manga Entertainment’s (Manga UK) Blu-ray releases of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya and K-ON!. In a statement made today by the company, they have for the time cancelled any release of K-ON! or the Haruhi movie on Blu-ray however the DVD distributions of these titles will remain in place. The following comments were made in terms of the series:
K-ON!
I will start with K-On first. My original plan was to release K-On as a complete season set on double disc DVD and Blu-ray at the same time. However, we were reliant on Bandai US supplying us their English dub and when they announced they would release K-On! as 4 individual DVD and BD volumes in America we had to agree to follow suit if we wanted to release K-On! around the same time as them. I made the decision to delay our 2-disc BD release until Spring 2012 rather than copy Bandai and produce 4 very expensive single disc BD releases. Once we got to the end of 2011 we learnt that the cost of access to the dubs plus the high cost of accessing the HD master, authoring and mastering of the discs and manufacturing was prohibitively expensive. In addition, we also realised that we would not be able to break even on the production of the Blu-ray.The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
With regards to the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya we were meant to release a Blu-ray in November and found out that the BD disc replication master we were sharing with Madman and which was supplied by Bandai USA did not work on Region B Playstation 3, so we had to scrap it and start again. Once again, we had to pay high access fees for the dub, and would have to pay a very steep access fees for the HD-master (we cloned Madman’s PAL DVD replication master for our DVD) and that combined with new authoring and mastering fees left us with another release that was going to lose Manga money. If Manga keeps losing money we go out of business and everyone loses!
Therefore, unfortunately a number of circumstances resulted in these two projects being dropped, however the DVD releases will still be purchasable. This also goes to show that while anime companies are pretty self-sufficient when it comes to DVD releases, it is a whole different game when it comes to Blu-ray releases which unfortunately cost more to produce and as penetration of the Blu-ray player over the DVD player has not met a high enough ratio, the cost benefit may outweigh the risks if they did not rely on the North American distributors. Either way, the plot is still there and honestly the quality of the series DVD releases are well above average so there should be few complaints either way.
MangaUK have a number of Blu-ray titles already announced for release in the early months of the year including Samurai Girls, Bleach Movies 1, 2 and 3, Mardock Scramble and Roujin Z. Check out their website HERE which I personally think is rather awesome, and the team there really do interact with their fans well.
Related posts:
- The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya – Review
- Parody Time! – The Melancholy of Haruhi-chan Suzumiya ☆ Nyoron! Churuya-san Part 1 Review
- Siren Visual – Angel Beats to be Released on Blu-ray This November
- Bandai Entertainment Shifts Focus, Stops Releasing New Titles
- Madman Entertainment to Release Whisper of the Heart on Blu-ray
