Friday, August 31, 2012

Bandai Will Stop Shipping Anime to Retailers In November

Ken Iyodomi, who is the president of Bandai Entertainment, sent us over a letter this morning to give us a heads up on what we've known has been coming and just never had a date for.

He writes:

"I am writing to inform you that Bandai Entertainment Inc in discontinuing its home video publishing and distribution business effective March 1, 2013.

As we methodically wind down the business, the last day that Bandai will be accepting any purchase orders is November 15, 2012, with our last shipments occurring on November 30th, 2012.

On Behalf of Bandai Entertainment Inc, I want to express our gratitude for the opportunity we've had to do business with your company, and I thank you in advance for your understanding and assistance during this period."

Well, we all knew this was coming up. While Bandai's remaining catalog of Anime releases will 'officially' go out of print in November, I just want to remind everyone that quite a few of their SKU's have already stocked out and others will probably sell out prior to the Nov cutoff, so if you need to pull the trigger on any of their stuff, don't wait too much longer.

This also means that current backorders for existing products are less likely to be filled, but we will do whatever we can to bring in as much Bandai stock as we can afford to between now and November.

2 comments:

A. said...

The "What about Gundam?" question, you stipulated in the newsletter is pretty interesting. I haven't watched anything Gundam related in years... but the prospect of someone else distributing the franchise has me intrigued. Particularly with the growth of digital distribution... (Kudos to anyone who can figure out a way to consistently convince Bandai that they don't need to rely on snail's pace home video distribution to popularize their titles.)

Robert said...

I don't think Bandai is much interested in licensing for digital delivery right now for the North American market unless it's part of a bigger package - at least for now.

Streaming Gundam? Well, stranger things have happened. I'd still like to see the unreleased Gundam series put out on DVD - I wouldn't have much interest in watching them streamed vs having them on physical, but I'm old and set in my ways... I still buy CD's and rip em. :-)