News
Manga Entertainment Updates on Podcast Including Trigun Film Delay
posted on by Andrew Osmond
Manga Entertainment has released the seventh in its series of podcasts (114 minutes), featuring Jerome Mazandarani with Andrew Hewson, Jonathan Clements, comics artist Rory Doona and host Jeremy Graves.
Among Mazandarani's announcements:
- Trigun: Badlands Rumble has been moved back to November 12.
- The next big announcements of future Manga Entertainment releases will be at the London MCM Expo from October 26 to 28.
- On the sales of the sub-only edition of Blue Exorcist, Mazandarani said: “We were looking at how many (units) we sold through in the first week based on what we shipped, and it was 60%. We did not ship as much as we were hoping to; it didn't get as many pre-orders as we'd hoped. But I'm pretty sure it's the bestselling sub-only release of all time for anime in the U.K. Aniplex announcing a few weeks before we were releasing it that they are going to do a dub (of Blue Exorcist) with Neon Alley didn't help.”
- Asked which older titles he would ‘upgrade’ from DVD to Blu-ray, Mazandarani stressed that it would depend on the availability of a suitable master. If that was the case, he cited Patlabor manga previously released the first two cinema films on U.K. DVD), as well as Wings of Honneamise and Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue and Paprika.
However, Mazandarani said, “I think all these would be viable once we get more favourable Blu-ray manufacturing costs. Those titles are not Ninja Scroll or Ghost in the Shell or Akira; they're not going to sell anywhere near as many copies…. I would need something in my catalogue to have done over two and a half, three thousand copies in a month in order for me to decide to re-release it on Blu-ray. Anything below that and I'm not going to sell enough Blu-rays and I'll lose money.” He said he was more interested in building up his Blu-ray catalogue with primarily new releases.
- Asked about festivals and theatrical anime screenings, Mazandarani said, “We always pay a lot of interest to the fan reactions at Scotland Loves Anime… I tend to wait for U.K. fans to see stuff… Each market's different, so it's very handy to have something like Scotland Loves Anime, Leeds Young People's Film Festival and the London Film Festival showing anime.”
