(Untitled)

[urufudo]

Hmm, just looking at a recent thread in the Slayers community, I've started to think about the production costs for anime series. I'm gonna look at the production values in Japan and then the licensing/distrubution costs for American companies.

Japanese CostsFirst, most places online seem to say that the average cost for producing one episode of

Comments

[commanderteddog]

I'd be curious as to what the current costs are for a series. 2005 was during the end of the anime bubble and I recall talk about the Japanese end of things overvaluing series. Also, there's been a catastrophic financial crash between then and now

[commanderteddog]

Further, one thought...

Point here is that by our standards, $5 million is not a lot of money.

$5 million is not a lot of money in the context of big Hollywood business. That was for a pilot of a major television series that was intended to be a dominating media force by the people with the biggest pockets in the world's media.

[commanderteddog]

The high costs of cult series (which anime is) on DVD isn't a problem unique to anime. I'm not saying that there's not price gouging, but on the other hand? Media outside of the mainstream always has a higher price that's often attributed to not being able to move as many units as something in the mainstream. Is that the truth? Damned if I know.

I'm a Mystery Science Theater fan, a series with a relatively small market. $50 gets me four 90 minute episodes. This is an improvement over the $70 I was paying for four episodes on DVD about five years ago and the $30 I was paying for a single episode on VHS in the late 1990s. I also remember when Red Dwarf DVDs were $40 for a season of six episodes. Don't get me started on Doctor Who DVDs, either.

[urufudo]

Lost was the one that had a pilot episode cost $10-$14 million. Apprently, the average cost to produce a pilot episode for the average TV show is about $4 million.

The fourth season of Trailer Park Boys consisted of eight episodes and cost $1.8 million, in contrast. But it's hard to compare a super low-budget series made for Canadian TV to anything that's produced for most American networks (ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, etc).

[commanderteddog]

What I'm saying is you're trying to compare a product designed originally for domestic Japanese consumption with a niche audience (I believe Slayers was a late-night anime, right? Almost everything is now...) with an product designed to be an international blockbuster. It's really hard to compare the two within the context of media distribution because both production companies have very different ideas in how to move the media and gain a profit off of it.

Trailer Park Boys is more comparable to anime in spirit, but at the same time it's not because of the funding that Canadian productions get from the government and that it's a domestic release as opposed to one that's gone through several levels of processing.

[urufudo]

I'm not comparing it to a single product designed to be an international blockbuster, I'm comparing it to programming here in general. If it suits the argument better, we can substitute Lost with Firefly, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Bullshit, Weeds, etc

[urufudo]

The package deal thing would seriously explain a lot, but it still leaves me going "wtf" because it'd have to be a huuuuge savings for them to make a profit with those figures. o_O Hmm.

I'm liking the idea of busting in and stealing their accounting stuff. XDD

[commanderteddog]

I've never seen real PROOF of the package deal, at least from what I remember. IIRC, FUNi also gets Gonzo series for cheap because of an agreement between both companies.

I'm curious about how FUNi is handling business too, personally, especially in what products are moving a lot and which ones aren't and how that profit carries over between different rereleases of the same series. Something like FMA is milked to the point where it can't be milked anymore, so they must be getting something out of it. If I know anything from nerd media, though, it's that really strange things pull in a profit for companies.