December is a light month for releases. Only 40, and only 4 of 39 with rank data available are even in 4-digit territory (and that’s counting the live-action Attack on Titan movie). Just as well, since the holiday surge in thresholds would make it impossible to get sales data for top releases anyway.
Data was first taken on November 20th, 2016.
November has five Tuesdays in it, and so it kind of a big month for releases numbers-wise. But there’s a lot of re-releases and low-sales-tier stuff clogging the list of 50+ titles we’ve got here. The only release doing notably well for a start is Overlord, due out on Nov 8 and averaging maybe 50 preorder copies per day at the moment.
Also, I added Hana Yori Dango from late October to the tracking sample, as it was added too late to catch in my initial assessment of that set.
Data was first taken on October 24th, 2016.
We’re moving into the part of the year where the real blockbusters (read: DBZ movies the past 2 years) usually get released, but this month is fairly quiet in terms of new content coming into the market. Rather, the 41 total releases are very heavy on sequels (10) and re-releases (17) of some kind.
One notable point – this month contains 2 series (Escaflowne and Code Geass) being re-released as both a multi-part set and a large-size collection. In an interesting turn, both versions of these releases are seeing a respectable amount of preorder traffic. Together, the re-releases of these two series make up over 20% of the 41 releases for the month overall (and that’s counting the 4 versions of 2 Korean-made films I’m tracking).
Data was first taken on September 26th, 2016.
We’re starting to enter into the part of the calendar year where distributors unload their top-tier hits. Biggest headliner this month is Highschool DxD s3, already in the top 500 about a week from release. Owari no Seraph is releasing a collector’s edition part 1 and part 2 at the end of the month, so I’m tracking the original part 1 releases (which came out in May) to see if it affects them at all.
As an aside, I’ve encountered a small hiccup in my price-tracking algorithm that affects 2-3 entries. For now, I’m handling the corrections by hand and working on an automated solution. None of the prices on this list were inaccurate as of August 26th, when I first took September data.
The US release of the Boy and the Beast movie sold a total of 14,001 copies in its first week on sale in June. The figure splits up into 12,146 BDs and 1855 DVDs.
Source picture and stray thoughts included below.
The August slate of releases has over 40 titles already. In particular, I’m intrigued by how Sailor Moon Crystal will perform. Also quietly rooting for a few other titles currently on the margin.
Earlier this month, we found out that Steins;Gate had sold over 100,000 units in the US, raking in a little than 4 million gross as a BD collection. This was an intriguing datapoint and posed two questions.
One, how typical is this result? Is it a generational occurrence? Annual? Monthly? Weekly?
Two, how is the US market for anime on disc doing as a whole?
Well, I have an abundance of amazon rank data for 218 unique US anime releases tracked over a 6-month period from January through June, 2016. Let’s dig into that a little.
Disclaimer: In this post I’m going to do some funky stuff with data that research has led me to believe I can reasonably do, but I don’t have any inside information and I could make mistakes here in a number of ways.
There is a desperately-needs-to-be-written followup to the Steins;Gate post from this Tuesday. But first I need to talk about Section 23, what their releases are doing on amazon right now, and why that’s curious.
Surprise! Apparently a 5-year-old anime can still pull in some numbers when it tries. US BD sales numbers just came out for late April 2016 and contained the surprising revelation that the complete version of Steins;Gate, released on September 30th, 2014 had sold over 100,000 copies in the US over the past 82 weeks.
Some people may have questions about this, so I’ll try to outline the situation and why it’s somewhat interesting.
Animetics 