Fervor and Chaos Regarding the “Dragon Ball Money”

Special feature: The ambitions of Shueisha, Kodansha and Shogakukan

Death of the author triggers battle for the publishing rights

Fervor and chaos regarding the “Dragon Ball Money”

[Caption] Photo by the editorial department
[Caption] A new series, Dragon Ball Daima, has also been greenlit, and is scheduled to premiere in Autumn 2024.

It’s been 40 years since its serialization started in 1984. Dragon Ball continues to be a goldmine IP (intellectual property) that draws in people from all ages.

According to survey app Sensor Tower, mobile games such as Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle, which launched in 2015, have earned more than five billion dollars in global revenue as of February 2024. The movie Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero, which arrived in movie theaters in 2022, has amassed 13 billion yen in box office revenue. A theme park boasting of a scale comparable to that of Tokyo Disneyland has also been approved for construction in Saudi Arabia. All this while the world continues to mourn the death of original author, Mr. Akira Toriyama, who passed away in March. However, rather than slowing down, the power of Dragon Ball seems to be accelerating, and taking the rest of the world along for the ride.

When asked about its charm, all the people involved speak in unison of its “simplicity.” A Bandai Namco group representative told us that, “The video games have sold well even in North America. If we take a step back to analyze why, they have this overwhelming ease of understanding, something that you can enjoy even when your head is completely empty. It just doesn’t get any simpler than ‘Let’s fight it out to find who’s the strongest!'”

The person in charge goes independent, triggering chaos

Last year, there was also a lot of commotion in the industry regarding this very property. The head of the Dragon Ball Room over at Shueisha, Mr. Akio Iyoku, went independent, taking some of the staff working under him along. Looking to obtain the property’s creative and IP management rights, he founded a new company, Capsule Corporation Tokyo, which took its name from a fictional enterprise from the Dragon Ball world.

After having worked, for instance, as V-Jum­p‘s editor-in-chief, in 2016 he took over as head of the Dragon Ball Room. A representative from Shueisha remembers that, “for better or worse, he kept doing Toriyama-sensei all sorts of favors, like greenlighting a movie version of his comic Sand Land without ever going through the higher-ups. At the same time, the animation studios and TV stations kept telling us of his self-important and arrogant attitude.”

Furthermore, he seemed to make no progress on the Metaverse and AI (artificial intelligence) collaborations that the top brass expected of him. As a result, in 2022, Mr. Iyoku was ordered to move to a new business division. Triggered by that unwilling transfer, within a year, he had gone independent. He started presenting himself as Mr. Toriyama’s representative instead of Shueisha, and suddenly, the possibility arose that Shueisha might actually lose the rights to Dragon Ball. The same representative from Shueisha told us, “it seems that even Toriyama-sensei was upset that Mr. Iyoku had been cast aside. Shueisha chairman Marue Horiuchi even personally went to the Toriyama residence in Aichi prefecture, but could not persuade him.”

The ones most heavily impacted by these events were the people at Bandai Namco, who were making a killing from Dragon Ball video games, such as Dokkan Battle. The same representative from Namco told us that, “Mr. Iyoku was now Toriyama-sensei‘s independent spokesperson, but the manga’s publishing rights rest with Shueisha. Now no one knows who to talk to regarding the property. Every summons to a meeting regarding Dragon Ball is now fuzzily addressed to ‘all relevant parties,’ and both Mr. Iyoku and the representatives from Shueisha just enter the room as though they have every right to be there, and every attempt to make both parties come to an agreement has just left everyone tired and annoyed.”

The passing of Mr. Toriyama happened right in the middle of this battle for the rights of the property. “They keep disagreeing, so nothing has been settled yet. Now it’s up to Mr. Toriyama’s family to decide,” states an employee of Shueisha, referencing the fact that some of the top brass from the anime industry want to get the bereaved family involved in this situation in order to reach an agreement.

Who gets the rights management to this massive IP? For now, this quagmire of a battle, unfitting of a shōnen manga, rages on with no end in sight.

[Caption] Photo by the official Dragon Ball X account
[Caption] A picture of the new theme park, scheduled for construction in Saudi Arabia.

(Article by Sōichiro Morita)