The above tweet from Nikkei Marketing Journal quotes Bandai Namco’s CEO Ishikawa, who said that they are putting effort into Tiger & Bunny and new toys and games are in development for the movie premiere this Fall.
Executive Producer Ozaki retweeted it with a short response:
Yes. He said “just as planned”.
What this means (apart from the fact that they want the money we so willingly shovel at them) is that Tiger & Bunny is selling really, really well. It has been – along with Gundam UC – a focus franchise of Bandai Namco for the past year. At this point Tiger & Bunny is not funding just itself, it and Gundam UC are also helping to financially cover for the franchises that aren’t making any profit. Some people might get upset over the money they spend on Tiger & Bunny paying for Sunrise’s flops (Gundam AGE, I’m looking at you), but this is simply how business works. I’m going to keep my business nerd restrained so I won’t bore you to death, but according to the so called 80-20 rule, 80% of profits are created by 20% of the products a business sells (or in this case, maybe 80% of profits come from 20% of the customers could be more accurate). Bandai Namco has many, many franchises, and although Gundam UC and Tiger & Bunny are just two lines on the long list of titles they’ve produced, they are currently the big selling ones. The big sellers allow the smaller, niche franchises to continue existing and keep the fans of those titles happy. This 80-20 rule isn’t applied just to making anime. It has many other applications, and not just in business. If you’re interested in learning more, look up “Pareto principle”.
I’m stating the obvious, but Tiger & Bunny is a true success story, considering how new it is and that it is an original anime. That is also why the merchandise sales are so critical for it, because the related merchandise is exactly where the profits are. BD&DVD sales are critical only to a certain breaking point. Speaking of BD sales, the anime BD&DVD sales in Japan are generally low because of their high pricing system. It’s not just anime that suffers from high prices, a Hollywood movie released in Japan on DVD costs easily twice as much as the European release. An anime title that sells over 10 000 copies per volume can be called a hit. (For the record, Tiger & Bunny sold around 25 000 copies of each Limited Edition BD volume.) “Why the prices on DVD and BD media are kept so high?” is a question I don’t have an answer for. If someone has an answer, please do share~
This post was actually longer first, but then there was a herpderp and I lost the whole thing. Also, at first I was going to just blog about Ozaki being “keikaku doori” and my initial point was that they seem to be investing proper money in the movie production. Instead it came out this way. I guess it couldn’t be helped. And I guess we might never see QUALITY gym again. *knocks on wood*
(TL note: keikaku means plan)
This is Sternbild 
I’d love to see the faces of those people who kept urging the T&B crew to give up already.
Me too. Or the faces of the people who didn’t want their company to sponsor Fire Emblem, that’d be sweet too…
on a somewhat related topic, have the actual character sponsors seen any profit from initially backing the show? we all know that BANDAI is already an instant WIN. what of Pepsi NEX, etc?
was it easier securing sponsors for the movie?
(also, it’d be fun to see how the incidentally promoted items like Perrier and Kenzo did on sales due to TaiBani)
I haven’t seen any figures, but I think the ones that continue sponsoring have seen profits. Gyu-kaku had a big Rock Bison meal set campaign that sounded like it was very popular. Pepsi Nex bottles with T&B cards sold out in an instant. Animate’s been decorating their stores with Fire Emblem. Some of the new sponsors for movie have jumped to the opportunity and advertising the tie-in already.
It would be really interesting to see what happened with the “accidental” promotions like Kenzo, but I haven’t seen any numbers for those either.