ADV Films in crisis?

While the likes of Funimation and Bandai continue to thrive, international anime publisher ADV Films appears to be undergoing something of a financial crisis. In the last few weeks alone, several news stories have broken that don’t exactly fill us with confidence in the future of the company.

  1. A former editor of ADV‘s now-defunct geek culture magazine PiQ has published an article explaining its demise. In particular, the author points to ADV‘s lack of finance as a key reason as to why they failed with the magazine. Another former editor, this time for PiQ‘s predecessor; Newtype USA, explained thatADV‘s ill-advised business “tactics” in late 2007 caused Kadokawa to pull the Newtype license”.
  2. ADV recently held a public auction to sell-off old office equipment and furniture as a result of recent staff cut-backs.
  3. On a more positive note, ADV‘s Chris Oarr has stated that ADV Manga has not been closed down, even though the label hasn’t released anything since volume 13 of Cromartie High School, which came out in February ’08. In particular, fans are anxious to read the latest volumes of the zany comedy ‘Yotsuba&!‘, but when asked about it’s future status, Oarr simply said “‘When will Yotsuba&! come out?’ We don’t know, and we’re not going to lie about it. I’m also not going to go out on the Net every day and say, ‘I don’t know.’ “.

Paul

Washed up on the good shores of Anime UK News after many a year at sea, Paul has been writing about anime for a long time here at AUKN and at his anime blog.

More posts from Paul...