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Manga Entertainment Comments on Sub-Only Blue Exorcist DVDs (Updated)

Following Manga Entertainment's facebook confirmation that its forthcoming "Definitive Edition" of Blue Exorcist will feature the dub on Blu-ray only, Jerome Mazandarani added a post to the thread. An edited version is below.

The "Blue Exorcist - Definitive Edition" will be released in two parts: Part 1 (episodes 1-13) on September 9 and Part 2 on October 22. Part 1 will be a combo pack, containing both Blu-rays and DVDs. The Blu-rays will contain both the dubbed and subbed versions; the DVDs will contain only the subbed version.

An edited version of Mazandarani's comments follow (see the facebook thread for the full version):

(...) We are not re-authoring the Blue Exorcist DVD discs to include the English dub because we simply don't believe we will be able to recoup the high costs. Generally, we can usually share the cost of production with another PAL territory distributor on the same release. This brings down the costs considerably, unfortunately for this new version of Blue Exorcist it was not possible. Therefore, we would have had to incurred another round of PAL conversion, mastering and authoring costs, which are very high. Especially considering there are 6 discs to produce in the series. Had Blue Exorcist not already been released on DVD in this territory we would have swallowed the cost, but I am afraid the success of the sub-only release has meant that we will likely not sell enough units of the new edition to make back our inception costs.

Sometimes timing is everything! You have to remember that when we originally licensed Blue Exorcist, there was no dub and no plans to make a dub by the producers. It's galling to me that a month after our original UK release date an English dub was announced by Neon Alley in the US. However, had we decided to postpone our release of Blue Exorcist last year to allow for delivery of the brand new English dub, we would have had to push the release date back from 20th August 2012 (Part 1) to March this year! (...) By the time the dub was announced around Anime Expo last summer we had already authored the first 2 discs in the series with subtitles and Japanese audio at considerable cost to us.

(...) In addition, there are various licensing issues that have made it difficult to find a satisfactory solution to this issue that I cannot go into on a public forum. So, regretfully, we have made the decision to only opt in on the Blu-ray authoring costs, which are shared between various distributors in the US and Australia and to re-bundle the existing Sub-only DVD release in the pack we are releasing.

(...) We did not make this decision lightly. I was aware that it would not go down well with some customers who expected to see a dual language DVD release of Blue Exorcist in this territory and I am terribly sorry if this has disappointed some of you. It is not the outcome I had hoped for, but as usual, in the murky world of anime licensing, it is the best solution we could find to a tricky problem.

Via UK Anime News

Update - Date of Part 2 added.