Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Bandai Announces December 2010 Releases

Bandai Entertainment has given us their December 2010 release schedule, and we now have it available on the store site for pre-order.

Ready? Here it is:

Gundam 00 Season 2, Vol #4 DVD (Eps #20-25)
Gundam 00 Season 2, Vol #4 DVD Special Edition (Eps #20-25)


Yep, that's it. Makes you wonder if Namco really wants a serious presence in the R1 Anime market anymore. Opps! There I go mouthing off again - I guess this post no longer qualifies as 'angst free'. Oh well.

While we're talking about Bandai, I wanted to give everyone an update on the 2nd Gurren Lagann movie. Bandai had given some direct retailers like us access to the GL movies over the summer. We got the first one, but they have since backpedaled on that arrangement and won't allow us to order them directly anymore. We can order them from the Bandai Store, but so far we haven't been able to get them to ship us any copies either directly or from the store site even though we've had orders in for them for weeks. Customer service at their direct store site is practically non-existent, so it been impossible for us to get an update on our orders there, and we've tried several times. I don't know when or if we'll have stock on these DVD's, and I thought I'd just let everyone know what's going on, and I apologize to everyone who has been waiting for them to ship.

Jenn, one of my folks over here, asked me in our product planning meeting today, why some of the studios "make doing business with them so hard, or even openly compete against us?" I only shrugged and said 'hell if I know - I guess they think they can do it better, but they never do."

1 comment:

Starcade said...

Bandai's been on last legs for a while -- and now we get an indication why:

IcV2 has estimated the 2010 anime market for DVDs to be under $200 million -- $200M being a top figure, if Wal-Mart alone accounts for 20% of the entire figure.

(The range given is $160-200M.)

(http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/18509.html)

My opinion is that Bandai, in their reorganization, has no clue with the left hand what the right is doing. Once Navarre gets rid of Funimation, I fully expect consolidation of Bandai's anime to Bandai Visual Japan and their anime division, removing another company from R1.