Forum - View topicNEWS: ADV Court Documents Reveal Amounts Paid for 29 Anime Titles
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jlaking
 Posts: 224 |
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The ADV titles were not started as S.A.V.E. collections. Some got half-sets and full sets when FUNi first released and (the titles) had over a year to proof themselves before got released again under line Viridan (some ADV titles that line) did make and S.A.V.E. collections. |
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CKSqua
Posts: 38 |
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I think those numbers merely represent the advance before royalties. On top of that fee, licensors get their cut on every unit sold.
After the collapse of both ADV and Geneon USA, Funimation mentioned that licensors had drastically reduced or even waived advances, making overseas revenue more dependent on actual sales. Given how a typical series tends to sell, it's no surprise that producers have low expectations for the American market and are gravitating toward some variation of the BVUSA strategy. |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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When did they shift from being an advance before royalties to being an advance on royalties (as in book publishing), which I guess is more often referred to in the industry as a Minimum Guarantee? If they are Minimum Guarantees, they are not separate from the unit royalties, but rather additional royalties are only paid if the titles earn in excess of the MG. That is, after all, what "advance" means ~ an advance against future earnings. In either case, if during the height of the boom, companies were paying MG's in excess of what the series would ever earn in royalties, then the Japanese licensors would indeed be sheltered from actual market performance, while if the MG does represent expectations and an outperforming titles does indeed normally yield additional royalty payments, then the Japanese licensors would indeed have their R1 rights income depend more directly on R1 market success. |
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Chrno2
 Posts: 6172 Location: USA |
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Wow, that's a lot of money spent. Good GAWD, Kurau was the most expensive on the list. Almost 1mil. A series I wanted released here so badly and finally bought it and then to find out that practically broke the bank. If I didn't have a whole new take on licensing prices I do now.
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Prede
 Posts: 388 |
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Sojitz went into this saying they'd offer up capital, connections, and "expertise". ADV was possibly desperate at the time, they needed capital. To trade capital for a few workers inside of your head office doesn't seem like a bad idea at the time. I mean really what are you losing? Nothing. So you have a few Japanese businessmen in your head office, helping you. If anything it seems like a positive aspect, maybe they can find out why your company wasn't doing the greatest and help you. Seems like a great deal. ADV stays alive, Sojitz makes money, etc etc. ADV was thinking they'd work together, but their public statements after the fact seem to show they butted heads from the moment they signed the contracts. The goal was to keep ADV a powerful player in the R1 market. On the surface of it, it doesn't look like Sojitz would ever want to do anything to hurt ADV, I mean they're invested in them! Why hurt a company you invest in? But ah that's the genius of it. The "just incase you're products don't make us a profit" clause of the contracts, turned out to be how they screwed over ADV. According to ADV they purposely overpaid for titles, making it entirely hard to profit from anything. Also again I must stress the desperate angle here. If it's true ADV was struggling at the time (the bubble did just burst), they accepted help from the first people who threw them a life line. As Mitch H, of fandom post, pointed out this is classic zaibatsu tactics. Insert your minions into a struggling company for an injection of capital. ADV had no way of knowing Sojitz was going into this deal unfaithfully, and just trying to make a quick buck. There was a long term strategy where everyone could have made money. They went for the short term one, that screwed ADV but not Sojitz. |
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minamikaze
Posts: 234 |
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Well... We do not actually know that Greenfield and Ledford had "NO SAY in the licensing deals" as a fact. That's really only what Greenfield and Ledford claimed happened, it is not necessarily the truth. Considering ADV's past history even before the Sojitz deal, it isn't like overpaying for licenses was something they had never done before. They did it all the time, which is how they ended up having to ask for help from Sojitz in the first place. Only previously when they got themselves deep into debt, they didn't have a convenient boogie man to blame it on like they did in the aftermath of the Sojitz deal. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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Though there has been some concern over the figure of 780,000 for Air Gear, that sounds rather reasonable to me. To be honest, I thought that the amount of money spent for some of these series was considerably higher than any of these figures. Now, I admit to being a huge Air Gear fan boy so I'm not going to say that my comments are totally non-biased, but that seems like a reasonable license fee to me.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Well, Air Gear has tits and action and hairstyles and things, so I can see why someone somewhere thought it would sell well Stateside. And hey, maybe it did.
So yeah, it does appear as if Air Gear was pegged as a major title. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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Hahaha, well, that is a pretty good description of a show that had an English dub that featured a couple of swear words as your very first introduction to Ikki. Anyways, I was under the impression that it sold pretty well in America. Seeing that Eva's films were around $1 million a title, I can only imagine what Viz is shelling out for the major Shonen series that they market. I also wonder if Funimation, back in the day, was fortunate enough to grab Dragon Ball on the cheap.
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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My first (and so far, only) formal introduction to the show was through NewType, which had the first episode on one issue's DVD. Man I miss NewType. Anyway, the episode was censored but it outright assured the audience that the official release would be completely uncensored. Given that in the first episode we have several girls in a big bath and that their chests were showing (though covered up by crows on the Newtype DVD), it was very obvious what sort of angle they were marketing it from. And I can't blame them. Fanservice sells, and sells well. If I dropped US$780,000 on a single title, I'd highlight and market the heck out of all the T&A shots too. I hope it sold well for ADV. As for some of the other titles, holy moly. Too bad we had to wait for a court case before being able to see all of this fascinating data. |
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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You know Japanese rights holder like to keep figures like this on the "down low". It's why we hear so little about them and how many units a particular title sold. I wonder if any of them are pissed over these getting out? |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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I doubt they're all that pissed. Well, not by these figures at any rate. The most recent ones are from 2007, which means that they're all pretty out of date.
If the Japanese are going to be pissed, it would probably be because the industry's dirty little secrets are being exposed, which makes everyone involved look bad. This Sojitz scandal is mind-boggling in its scope of how much money was pissed down a drain. Kurau: Phantom Memory is a fantastic series, maybe the best title on the list, but there's no way in hell it was ever going to make a profit on a US$960,000 license fee. It just doesn't have the marketing appeal. |
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vashna
Posts: 1313 |
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Nah, I'm actually pretty sure that those crow shots were even in the uncut version of the series. The presence of a crow is a joke about the kanji that spells out Ikki Minami's name, as well as the color of his hair. I liked the series a lot because I'm big into extreme sports and...well, I'm not going to lie and say that I didn't like to catch all of the 'attractive' scenes involving Ringo and Simca.
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