ICv2 had an interview w/Tokyopop CEO Stuart Levy, who had some things relevant to this topic I’ve been reporting on.
“Looking at graphic novels and manga, Tokyopop probably has more titles out there than anyone. I’d say it’s us and then Viz, and we have more mid-list titles than Viz. They happen to have a couple more hit titles; and they have more shows on TV. I think it’s mainly the mid-list that came back. We got hit pretty hard by that; I’m pretty sure they got hit pretty hard too. I don’t know how they work internally, but they’ve got huge parent corporations and they also have the buffer of a few more hit titles than we do. Everybody was taking the brunt of things but Tokyopop didn’t have as many shock absorbers.”
Clearly manga and graphic novels have had a rough year (as have we all), and while parts of it are due to ‘Twilight’, other parts are not as rndm and don’t make as good puns. But in all seriousness, it looks like Tokyopop is really feeling the financial burn…
“The consumer appetite for Japanese content is still there, but a lot of people are able to get stuff online for free. And there’s another thing that I’ve noticed over the past few years. At conventions instead of fans getting behind a show (an anime) or a manga title, it seems like fans are doing cosplay and hanging out and it’s a little bit more of a community-based, social environment. Maybe that’s the result of what’s happened on the Web, but that’s part of it too.”
You know its funny, cause this is something XenoPhoenix has spoken about on multiple occasions. People go to cons, and stick to one thing and get bored, or gradually get obsessed with (or at least really into) just that one thing. Now this isn’t all fans or con-goers, but I could easily pull 100 from my address book…It also doesn’t help that a lot of the titles in recent history seem redundant. Fans have been saying for a while the market is saturated, and you can only deal with hearing the same story so many times, so in that context its easy to see why fans may not be as pumped about the shows as they used to be. And don’t get me started about my rant about how every 8 out of 10 con-goers feels they have to cosplay. Look, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to cosplay, but what’s the rush? Why is is that ppl feel so pressed to dress up the first time/almost everytime they go to a con. Maybe I’m being biased since I don’t cosplay, but there seems to be this unsung stigma that if you don’t dress up, your not a fan. That seems to be the overall push. Cosplay events get buku attention and everything else seems kinda pushed to the side. Thoughts?
“Tokyopop exited the anime business a couple of years ago. What do you think the future of anime is here in the U.S.–is the packaged media business over?
It’s not just about anime. I think a lot about all entertainment businesses, including film and television, and the digital revolution is a significant one. At the end of the day are we really talking about extremely low budget, one person, two person production crews that make very small things, kind of the YouTube of the world? How will production companies continue to pay for more expensive content if piracy truly hits everyone and there are smaller revenue streams?Packaged media seems to me that it’s going away. There’s no way around that, it’s going away.
How long it will take to go away completely? What will be the business models that replace that? How much of that will be able to pay for production? Those are all the questions that remain and I don’t think anybody has those answers right now.
The most that you can do is to do everything you can to create a huge blockbuster hit because then you have the opportunity for more revenue streams.”
Hmmm. Does that mean the world of tomorrow will make Crunchyroll the new king of anime?
