Not Good News….

Uh-oh.

Several titles have been removed from ADV Films’ website since last Monday, including any reference to them in the site’s main page, store, and trailers, as well as trailers and videos on Anime Network’s website….Notably, all mention of these titles have been removed from ADV Films’ online store and trailer collection, even though listings for other titles remain on the website. Some additional titles have been removed from the online store’s listings, although ADV Films or the Anime Network still hosts trailers for them online. When asked about the removal of the above titles from its website, ADV Films declined to comment.

They’ve canceled the Tuesday night showings at Alamo Drafthouse and ended the ADVocates program a week or two ago, also. Coming on the heels of the fire sale, this isn’t a good sign. Via.

Edit: Steven was ahead of me.

Update: The following story used to be posted as a story at ICV2, but has been replaced with a copy of an earlier article. Google’s cache saved it long enough for a fan to grab it and post in the thread over at ANN.

ADV Cancels 37 Titles
Anime Offerings on ‘Indefinite Hiatus’
Canceled
January 28, 2008

In a letter to retailers ADV Films has identified 37 anime properties including Devil May Cry, Gurren Lagann, and Pumpkin Scissors that are “on indefinite hiatus, effective immediately.” The list includes virtually all of the properties that ADV has announced since its financing deal with the Sojitz Corporation (see “Japanese Investment Bulks Up ADV”) in late June of 2006. The properties that ADV has announced (and released) since then are from a variety of anime studios but they were all licensed through the ARM Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan Contents Investment, an investor group that included the Sojitz Corporation, the Development Bank of Japan and KlockWorx. In its letter to retailers ADV explained: “ADV has suspended certain elements of its former alliance with ARM Corporation, which financed the acquisition of these titles. ADV is working closely with various constituencies with the goal of restoring most if not all of these properties to our release schedule at a later date to the extent possible.”

The list includes properties that have already been released in their entirety such as Nerima Daikon Brothers, Guyver, and 009-1, series such as Pumpkin Scissors, Kurau Phantom Memory, and Red Garden that have only been partially released, and eagerly awaited anime such as Devil May Cry, Gurren Lagann and 5 Centimeters per Second that have been announced for later this year. The complete list of ADV anime properties on hiatus is:

009-01
5cm Per Second
Ah! My Goddess: Flights of
Fancy
Air Gear
Air Movie
Air TV series
Best Student Council
Blade of the Phantom Master
Comic Party Revolution
Coyote Ragtime
Devil May Cry
Ghost Train
Gurren Lagann
Guyver
Innocent Venus
Jinki: Extend
Kanon TV Series
King of Bandit Jing: 7th Heaven
Kurau Phantom Memory
Le Chevalier D’Eon
Magikano
Moeyo Ken TV Series
Moonlight Mile
Nerima Daikon Brothers
Pani Pani Dash!
Project Blue
Pumpkin Scissors
Red Garden
Synethesia
The Wallflower
Tokyo Majin
UFO Princess Valkyrie – Third
and Fourth Seasons
Utawarerumono
Venus vs. Virus
Welcome to the NHK
Xenosaga

Coming on the heels of Geneon’s departure (see “Geneon Ankles American Anime Scene”) the ADV announcement is more bad news for the reeling North American Anime Industry. For the past few years ADV has been the number two anime company in the North America, with a solid 12-13% share of the anime DVD market. Recently though ADV has been showing signs of stress. It has pulled its support from its industry-leading collection of anime clubs and two weeks ago announced that it would cease publication of Newtype USA (see “Newtype USA Ending”). The collapse of ADV’s deal with ARM does not necessarily mean the end of one of the trailblazing American anime companies, which was founded in 1992. ADV still has an extensive library of titles including the ever-popular Neon Genesis Evangelion. Still the fate of ADV subsidiaries such as The Anime Network, the Newtype successor PiQ (see “Newtype Successor Broadens Focus”), and the ADV manga publishing program that includes the bestselling Yotsuba&! manga remains in the balance as does the future of one of the pioneering powerhouses of the American anime market.

Update 2: And what really frosts me is that when I cruised over to Baka-Wolf to see if TAMNM ep. 4 was subbed yet, some jackass was ragging on the Baka site because they were asking for donations to help keep the the site up… not because he didn’t agree with fansubbing, no…. because he didn’t like being told to donate, or seeing ads, or being called a leecher. I’d say that he was just trolling, but the hell of it is that there really are people that damn clueless. Of course, listening to the chat over the last several days, I’m convinced that 90% of them are high-school kids with no money anyway. Paraphrasing a conversation:

Poster 1: “How much anime you got dl’d?”
Poster 2: “200 GB”
Poster 3: “100 GB and I own 150 DVD’s”
Poster 2: “Wow, I only own one.”

Sigh.