Guillotine

So I guess everyone saw this coming for the last 5  years or so, but it has finally happened. As of Sept 1st ADV has posted a notice of being split up and acquired in place of their website. http://www.advfilms.com/ Not really a big shock at all, and as much as I hate the idea of an anime company going away there are some possible upsides to this. Apparently all the transactions have gone smoothly so hopefully it means a lot of good people won’t lose their jobs, and could find themselves in a better situation perhaps than holding onto a company that has been on the verge of bankruptcy for years. I hope this is the case and wish all the ADV employees good luck.

There was one part of the release which peaked my interest. It seems that Valkyrie Media LLC has acquired 100% holdings of The Anime Network. This is the thing that I am most curious to see. What will happen to to AN??? As far as the Anime and Manga I don’t really have any real concerns as I’m sure plenty of companies are waiting to take some titles from this.

On a personal note hopefully this means we’ll finally get a dubbed release of CLANNAD and Princess Resurrection depending on who winds up with those licenses.

It also means I’m gonna have to watch out for DVD sales of the shops looking to unload ADV merchandise.

Update: So after some searching around it turns out that all the companies that bought ADVs assets turn out to have the same Houston, TX address, and were all established this year. So it’s looking more and more like ADV did not actually shut down, but instead sold off the company to themselves. Seems like it was a way to get out of the Sojitz deal. Since Sojitz owns 20% of ADV’s stocks they now own 20% of pretty much nothing.

Essentially ADV will likely just be forming under a new name now. So it’s not really a shutdown at all. The only thing ADV will be losing are the rights to shows that were acquired during the year that they were actively partnering with Sojitz (I believe that would be 2007), but that’s not much of an issue since they were already unable to release any of those titles at the time anyway.

Update 2: (This from Anime News Network)

SXION 23, Valkyrie Media Partners, and Seraphim Studio are filed under Griffin D. Vance IV’s name. Griffin Vance was A.D. Vision’s former Senior Vice-President of Business and Legal Affairs, but he now operates his own law practice. Vance’s law firm shares the same postal address as SXION 23, Valkyrie Media Partners, and Seraphim Studio.

So now it appears even clearer that this was simply a reorganization rather than a shut down/buy out. A rather well thought out one too if everything goes smoothly.