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ADV Films' panel followed directly on from Beez's, and, with the MVM and State of the Industry panel on the Sunday, it was the last industry panel of the day.

There were a fair few people in the hall for the ADV Films / Lace Digital Media panel, and it's with good reason.  ADV Films' US parent company have crumbled in spectacular fashion, going from one of the leading Western anime distributors with offices around the world and toy, manga, music and magazine publishing divisions, to struggling for survival in the space of just a few months.  The knock-on effect this has had has been catastrophic for their UK office, which closed earlier this year with the loss of all staff.  ADV Films survives in the UK as a label because of Lace Digital Media Sales, who are acting a distributor for ADV's titles.  Former ADV UK head honcho Hugh David was taken on initially short-term as an advisor for Lace, but the move was made permanent and it is his familiar face that presents the ADV/Lace panel.

Andrew Partridge from Beez also hung around on the ADV panel as Hugh explained what ADV were bringing us for the rest of the year.  As expected no new series are in the pipeline and at the moment, just the previously announced box set releases including a straight to box set release for E's Otherwise, a series that has not previously been released in the UK.  Hugh commented that if E's Otherwise does well ADV may release future series straight to box set.  He said that they had discussed this possibility with Japanese anime studio and distributor Gonzo, who suggested that they may be willing to allow them to do this with their series.  Other box sets on the way include a new Neon Genesis Evangelion tin, which would be similar to the limited edition tin they released previously but would contain thinpack DVDs instead of the digipack in the earlier set.  He's looking into other exclusive extras for the set, including artcards of the cover artwork and possibly a PenPen keyring!  ADV are also looking into releasing boxsets for various other series, including Peacemaker which has sold well when bundled together at cons, and even those that they have lost the rights to following the strife ADV USA have suffered.
 

Hugh David discusses ADV

  In fact the recovery of the business was a recurring theme, and Hugh said that ADV are looking to finish the series they have lost rights to - particularly those which have been left in limbo with only a volume or so to go.  However, it will depend on whether Lace deem it worthwhile as some series, such as Red Garden, did quite badly sales-wise so it could be hard to justify releasing the rest.  Hugh did say that there are no new releases lined up for 2009, but if ADV USA picks up the worldwide rights for anything then ADV UK may get the chance to release them.  It was at this point that Hugh digressed, as he was also representing Lace as well as ADV.  It turns out

that Lace now own 4DigitalMedia, the company that used to be ILC Prime, and who have been releasing the live action Death Note films.  Hugh is acting as an advisor for the release of the next films which are due to come to DVD later this year, and he spoke very highly of the DVD sets that are coming out here, which he believes are the best DVD releases of the films.  Apparently Death Note did really well and more Asian film may be coming from them in future.  He also did a swift plug for his friend and anime columnist Jonathan Clements' forthcoming book Schoolgirl Milky Crisis, which is due out in September from Titan Books.  The book collects together Jonathan Clement's columns from the sadly defunct NewType USA, including those that were too controversial to be printed.  Should be well worth picking up!

After this it was pack to ADV's sorry state and what the future held.  Hugh was quite frank about ADV's plight, which seemed to be due to them biting off more than they could chew.  Reading between the lines it appears that the company tried to diversify by launching several new divisions that needed to be successful to fund the outlay needed to set them up, and when the credit crunch hit and the market slowed the business basically went under and had to shed pretty much all of its subsidiaries to survive.  ADV has survived by the skin of it's teeth, going past the point when most companies would gone bankrupt and somehow come out the other side.  It's survived because of its cost-cutting which has seen the demise of its European operations, magazine publishing division, warehouses and effective closure of its music, manga and toy arms, which appear to be surviving in name only.  They even sold off all of their office furniture last year and now pretty much only retain their Houston headquarters.  However, the worst is past and the company has embarked on the road to recovery a little wiser by all accounts.  In fact the future looks relatively bright, and as Hugh points out a few years ago Manga Entertainment consisted of just one person in a music label's office running Manga when they had time, now they're one of the UK's leading distributors once again and are releasing the likes of Naruto and Bleach.  If they can do it then there's no reason ADV can't as well.

There were a few other interesting tidbits scattered about as well:

  • E's Otherwise had been certified by the BBFC some time ago, but ADV hadn't gotten around to releasing it.

  • Red Garden only sold less than a hundred copies.

  • Hugh can't understand why Red Garden did badly, as he points out the plot is very similar to the highly rated film The Fury and the series was very good.

  • Andrew Partridge from Beez also said that their series Fantastic Children sold a lot worse than he expected.

  • ADV's live action releases did extremely badly, but conversely the live action Death Note films have sold exceptionally well.

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion continues to be one of ADV's top titles.


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