The new film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods continued to prove successful into its second weekend, with its 9-day total attendance standing at 1,488,518 and gross revenue at ¥1,772,955,800 (passing the halfway mark to Toei’s target of ¥3 billion). The audience demographic holds steady with parents and children, older fans from back during the series’ original run, and young women in their teens to early 20s.
08 April 2013, 10:00 PM EDT3 Comments
Coming off an already-impressive announcement of Ryūsei Nakao (Tambourine, Freeza, Coola), Masako Nozawa (Son Goku, et al.) and Toshio Furukawa (Piccolo), Animazement has also announced Yūko Minaguchi (Videl, Pan) as a guest for their convention this year.
Animazement will take place 24 May 2013 to 26 May 2013 at the Raleigh Convention Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Kanzenshuu will be there to cover all of the panels and stories from this amazing collection of talent!
08 April 2013, 7:11 PM EDT3 Comments
As the new film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods continues to hold steady in theaters, we felt it was proper to continue diving into all of the reference materials coming out these days — guide books, magazine articles, website interviews, etc. — to get a better idea of where the movie actually came from. So many ideas were drafted and tossed out before the final stages of production that we almost have an entirely different story sitting out there in the unused ether. Join us for an in-depth look at some of these ideas and where the story could have taken us!
For those of you who may also wish to refer to this material in text form, the Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods page in our “Movie Guide” has been updated with an “Original Draft/Design Concepts” section which includes a few tidbits we have yet to post in full over in our “Translations” section!
SHOW DESCRIPTION:
Episode #0329! VegettoEX, Hujio, and Julian dive into a wealth of reference materials for the new film “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods” and attempt to discover where the film’s story truly came from. While the final result was fantastic, imagine an alternate version with a lizard-esque villain, Super Saiyan God with a cape, a wedding instead of a birthday party, and a far darker story than has ever been told before!
REFERENCED SITES:
- “Battle of Gods” On Track To Beat 3 Billion Yen Goal
- “Battle of Gods” Passes 500,000 People & ¥680 Million in 2 Days
- “Battle of Gods” Opening Week Figures Update
- 6th “Please Tell Us, Akira Toriyama-sensei!!” Q&A
- 7th “Please Tell Us, Akira Toriyama-sensei!!” Q&A
- “Super Saiyan God Son Goku” Coming to “Zenkai Battle Royale”
- More Updates & Video Coming For “J-Stars Victory Vs” (PS3/Vita)
- “J-Stars Victory Vs” (PS3/Vita) First Commercial
- “Dragon Ball SD” Vol. 1 Release Details
- European Namco-Bandai Teasing New DBZ Announcement?
- “Dragon Ball Heroes: Ultimate Mission” Fifth-Week Sales
- Upcoming Dragon Ball Releases: April 2013
Enjoy! Discuss this episode on the Kanzenshuu forum.
If you have been keeping tabs on the new film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods — as we have! — then you are probably already aware that, in its first weekend, it was doing pretty well! It probably comes as no surprise that it continued that trend in its first full week.
As reported this past Thursday by Cinema Today, the film was set to top one million in attendance on its sixth day, keeping a steady pace from its opening-weekend figures.
As of this past Wednesday (its fifth day in theaters), the film had already reached attendance of roughly 990,000, and was seen as certain to reach 1,000,000 on Thursday (its sixth day), thus making it the fastest movie to reach that milestone this year (in Japan). The precise numbers as of Wednesday stood at attendance of 988,790 and gross revenue of ¥1,146,467,600.
The Cinema Today article goes on to state that other family-oriented films for the spring vacation period, Doraemon: Nobita’s Secret Gadget Museum and Wreck-It Ralph (renamed Sugar Rush in Japan), are also doing well. Dragon Ball has many parents taking their children to see the film, but it is also attracting older fans of the series, as well as pairs/groups of women in their teens to early 20s, truly demonstrating its strength across generations.
In addition to totals at the end of the spring vacation period, Toei is looking ahead with great expectations for audience turnout during the Golden Week holiday at the beginning of May.
A recent article from Kōgyō Tsushinsha does not give any hard numbers for attendance or earnings, but shows Dragon Ball Z maintaining its place at the top of the pack for its second weekend.
Namco-Bandai has unveiled the first video footage for their upcoming crossover fighting game J-Stars Victory Vs with a debut commercial:
The footage showcases the four known playable characters — Goku (Dragon Ball), Luffy (One Piece), Toriko (Toriko), Naruto (Naruto) — battling with each other and performing their signature attacks.
J-Stars Victory Vs, initially unveiled as Project Versus J, is tied in with the 45th celebration of Jump and will be available for the PlayStation 3 and Vita at some unspecified point with a promise that there will be more “announcements of successive Jump heroes joining the battle” to decide who is the strongest, and to keep your eyes on the official site.
We will, of course, keep on top of any further announcements via their own website and the regular plethora of magazines in Japan!
07 April 2013, 10:21 PM EDTComment
The new series of Q&As with original manga author Akira Toriyama — “Please Tell Us, Akira Toriyama-sensei!!” — continues on for yet another week in today’s issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump (2013 #19) in Japan. We are still back on the one-question-per-week schedule, and this one brings us a tidbit on backstories that Toriyama creates in his head.
Do you have any unspoken backstories?
Just because he’s the God of Destruction, I wouldn’t like it if he just showed up for no good reason and went on a rampage. So even if it’s not mentioned in the work itself, I do try to come up with a convincing backstory in my own mind. …Although, I forget surprisingly quickly. (laughs)
We will continue to archive each of Toriyama’s answers on the respective page of our “Translations” section if any more are included, even now after the movie’s release!
06 April 2013, 8:09 PM EDTComment
The third in a series of four new Dragon Ball books, “Chōzenshū 3: Animation Guide Part 2″, was released in Japan this week (04 April 2013), packing a huge amount of material from four prior Daizenshuu into one book.
A good bunch of new material was also included, such as a 25-page spotlight on Dragon Ball GT (which does not pull its material from the Perfect File books), along with a feature on the new film Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods.
The “Library of Adventure” sections have all been printed in one shot now titled as as “Design Library”. The “All Story Digest” pages from the third, fifth, and supplemental Daizenshuu are also present and accounted for, plus a new section in the same format for GT. Only one “Variety of DB” page made it through intact this time, showcasing Toriyama’s redesigns of the Red Ribbon Army for the 10th Anniversary film. The “Next Movie” page from Daizenshuu 6 that showed conceptual art with different character designs has been omitted, as well as all “Memorial” sections that highlight merchandise related to the older movies.
An overview page for this volume has been added to our “Databook Guide” breaking down all of the sections. Links to our translations of the republished interviews are also included.
Chōzenshū 3: Animation Guide Part 2 is available for purchase online at CDJapan and Amazon Japan.
03 April 2013, 12:13 PM EDTComment
This is another huge week for new Dragon Ball merchandise releases, so we thought it was worth posting up a reminder for anyone with a little extra cash burning some holes in their pocket!
The third of the new Chōzenshū guide books, “Animation Guide Part 2”, is due out 04 April 2013 for ¥2,300 and will cover a whopping 352 pages. The previous volume covered Daizenshuu 3 & 5, leaving plenty of material to cover in a second animation guide. We already know “Part 2” is set to include Daizenshuu 6 (“Movies & TV Specials”) as well as new Battle of Gods material, but we hope to have a full rundown on the new volume for you this week!
The print-edition “Full Color Comics” return from Shueisha all on 04 April 2013 with five volumes to cover the entire Freeza story arc. Each volume runs 248 pages for ¥630 each. This new edition colorizes Akira Toriyama’s original manga artwork, and is also available digitally both in Japan and on a weekly-basis in English from Viz in the domestic Weekly Shonen Jump.
The first collected-edition volume of spin-off author and artist Naho Ooishi’s Dragon Ball SD also comes out 04 April 2013. The volume will run ¥600 and contain 192 pages.
The May 2013 issue of Nikkei Entertainment! magazine will contain a lead feature on the “revival” of Son Goku and Dragon Ball. A separate feature will revolve around Shōnen Jump and its rivals. The issue will run you ¥600 and is also due out 04 April 2013.
The “Miracle of God” expansion for Miracle Battle Carddass hits 12 April 2013, with boxes running ¥4,200 for 20 packs of eight cards each.
The vast majority of these items are available via online retailers such as CDJapan and Amazon Japan. What will you be picking up? Share some pictures with us!
Dragon Ball Heroes: Ultimate Mission for the Japanese Nintendo 3DS fell off the Media Create best-sellers list last week — which would have been its fourth week on the charts — but managed to hang in there on the Famitsu list, which pegged it at 8,924 copies for the week.
The game appears to have made a slight comeback during its fifth week (covering the period of 25 March 2013 to 31 March 2013), popping back up at #19 on the Media Create list with another 9,414 copies sold.
Media Create puts the game at 140,208 total copies sold so far, which also lets us reverse-engineer the math to get 9,097 copies back last week compared to Famitsu‘s 8,924 — definitely in the same ballpark.
The Heroes brand has absolutely zero penetration outside of Japan (with the exception of a few character designs plopped into 2011’s Ultimate Tenkaichi), and while our own Herms says to not lose any sleep over missing out on the game, it sounds like a good bunch of you would still be interested in a localized version. Is this still the case? Hoping any upcoming announcements give you some good news?
02 April 2013, 2:16 PM EDT12 Comments
When Namco-Bandai brought the Dragon Ball video game license back in-house from Atari in 2009, the American branch of the company heavily promoted the franchise and their upcoming games over the course of the next year. After that, however, the promotions were significantly scaled back. The European branch of the company, on the other hand, has consistently been in the mix with fans to hype up whatever releases are on the way at the time. In fact, the vast majority of promotional videos for Ultimate Tenkaichi — highlighting game features like character creation — were done in-house by the European branch exclusively.
It is perhaps no surprise that the European branch is the one teasing what is likely a new video game announcement (link available only to European Facebook visitors):
So far, there is no real information on what the big console game for the franchise — if any — will be this year. Dragon Ball Heroes: Ultimate Mission on the Nintendo 3DS remains exclusive to Japan (despite comparatively-fantastic sales), J-Stars Victory Vs has yet to receive a release date in Japan (never mind an international announcement), and there is still no word on any possible home console port of Zenkai Battle Royale. Tap Battle for Android-based (and eventually iOS) devices also has no international announcement just yet.
That all being said, Namco-Bandai’s big games preview day is coming up soon this month, and it would be the prime place for an announcement of this type! Last year’s “Global Gamers Day” brought us the formal reveal of Dragon Ball Z for Kinect. Hopefully we get a pleasant surprise this year.
Thanks to John-Edvard for the heads-up and screen grab!