Answerman

How Hard Was it to Get the UK Rights for Dragon Ball Z?

Michael asks:

“How challenging was it for Manga UK to originally acquire the rights for Dragon Ball Z?”

Whoa! Triggered! Reflecting on my negotiations with Toei Animation regarding the license acquisition of all 291 episodes of Dragon Ball Z, along with the various animated movies, OVAs, TV specials, and different incarnations, brings back a whole lot of traumatic and therapeutic memories.

I jest. Or do I?

In all honesty, it wasn't easy acquiring the UK and Ireland home video rights for DBZ, but the outcome was absolutely worth it for a host of different reasons. So! Gather around the metaphorical campfire as I regale you with my story, a “Heroic Quest,” if you will, that spans continents and decades.

I don't believe that anything to do with Akira Toriyama (may he rest in power eternally) and his beloved Dragon Ball franchise is uncomplicated. That tends to happen with multi-billion-dollar franchises. According to a 2023 report published by TitleMax, Dragon Ball Z is the 15th most valuable intellectual property of all time, worth an estimated US$24 billion. According to Toei Animation's Q3 Fiscal Year 2025 earnings report (covering the period October to December 2024), DBZ is their highest-earning property, generating $123M in that quarter alone and surpassing One Piece internationally. Not a bad result for a 41-year-old franchise. Recent news stories since Toriyama-sensei's untimely passing at age 68 on March 1st, 2024, seem to suggest that not all is well with the relationship between Toriyama's Capsule Corporation Tokyo and Shueisha Publishing as the different parties tussle for the right to manage the ongoing monetization of Toriyama's non-serialized manga IP and copyrights.

I assume that by default, this may have put Toei in the middle of any arguments surrounding the future of Dragon Ball Super and Dragon Ball Daima anime projects. There is only one anime production committee responsible for the production and management of all of the various Dragon Ball-related projects, covering the original Dragon Ball, DBZ, GT, Super, and Daima series. Toei Animation is the primary production company, alongside Shueisha (the manga publisher), Toei Video, and other key companies involved in sales and licensing. In my case, this included Toei's Paris-based rights management and licensing company, Toei Animation Europe.

Despite the UK and Ireland home video rights being a fairly modest commercial opportunity, it still took me over seven years to convince Toei to agree to DVD distribution rights with Manga Entertainment. I started the conversation with Toei Animation Europe back in 2007, following the tremendous local success of the launch of the first 52 episodes of Naruto on DVD. That gave us credibility as a good partner for Shonen Jump's anime properties.

As I said earlier, Toei Animation Europe, with its office in Paris, is a completely separate company from Toei Animation America and Toei Animation, the Tokyo-based entity that controls APAC (Asia and Pacific) and Oceania. At the time, Toei Animation Europe was responsible for managing rights across the EMEA region, which consists of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “UKIE,” referring to the UK and the Republic of Ireland, to the dismay of many diehard Brexiters, is considered “part of Europe,” and as such, the territory is managed by the Paris team. I am pretty sure this led to conflict between Toei Europe and Toei America, who, no doubt, believed that the UK rights should fall under their control because they handled the English-speaking world more or less, thanks to its business in the USA and Canada.

North America is a massive market. In fact, it is the largest market for anime rights negotiating outside of Japan, so why shouldn't Toei America also manage the relatively small market of the UK/Ireland? I presume they had similar designs on Australia and New Zealand, which are under the control of Toei Japan because the Oceania region falls under “APAC." In addition, the U.S. team's two largest customers throughout the 2010s were Crunchyroll and Funimation, whom they licensed directly to, and both of whom always demanded “all English-speaking territories” rights when negotiating. Toei America, had they been able to offer these additional territories to their partners, would have been able to add a premium to the licensing fee. As America and Europe were completely separate companies, one can appreciate why Toei Europe never ceded the territory to their brethren in the New World, and that was a good thing for us at Manga. DBZ, One Piece. and Digimon helped to keep us in business.

To make matters more complicated, Toei Europe did not want to enter into a bog-standard royalty-based license agreement with Manga.Usually, a royalty-based licensed agreement would include Manga paying an upfront advance/minimum guarantee and a fixed royalty (20-25% on “adjusted net profits”) after we had recouped the advance payment. Instead, we negotiated a more complex profit-sharing agreement. This meant that Manga had to agree to a flat distribution fee that we got to earn, plus a recoupment of our sales and distribution costs. Any profits over what was recouped and our fee went entirely to Toei. It was a rich deal for them. They knew what they were doing.

I knew that if we already had Naruto in HMV and on Amazon, we could upsell DBZ box sets to those customers as well, and that is exactly what happened. In terms of monthly new releases, we were able to release a brand-new Naruto collection every 2-3 months. During the intervening months, we would release a Dragon Ball set, followed by a One Piece set the month after that. These licenses enabled us to keep hungry collector fans coming back to stores every month. HMV loved us. We could've made a lot more money off DBZ, but at the end of the day, we were happy to have the license instead of one of our competitors. It beefed up our presence at retail, and the monthly home video chart positions and annual financial reports made us look really good in a press release.

Don't forget that Toei is only one of the partners of the Dragon Ball anime production committee, so to be fair to them, they were negotiating a preferable deal that delivered more money, not just to them, but also to Shueisha and the other committee members. At the time of my negotiations with Toei, South Park was very popular. There is one episode in particular where Cartman sets up a telesales business. Each week, as we got closer to a final agreement, I would have a 30-minute telephone call with the head of European audiovisual sales at Toei Animation Europe. I'd always finish my call with that person by ending with the refrain, “You're breaking my balls,” and I'd say it with my best Cartman voice. One of the best things that came out of this deal was the relationships I still enjoy to this day with many of the team there.

I'm serious about the relationship. I did break my “you-know-whats” for Toei, as did all of my colleagues and our boss, the legendary Colin Lomax. The head of sales and the president of Toei's Europe were the only company representatives from Japan that I worked with for those first 12 years of my career who personally traveled to London for Colin's funeral in January 2019. It brings a tear to my eye thinking about their thoughtfulness and kindness. Colin's family and his work family were moved by their good grace. Gestures like that mean a hell of a lot.

Needless to say, Manga had renewed that distribution agreement for Dragon Ball Z with Toei Europe four times before I left the company in 2021. We went on to license all of the various Dragon Ball anime up to that point, as well as all of Digimon and the first 220-odd episodes of One Piece. The deal didn't happen quickly. It was complicated. It was difficult, but by being transparent at all times, communicating clearly, maintaining a sense of humor, and delivering on all of our promises to them, we built the foundations for a positive business relationship.

What about the DBZ Anime Movies?

I am so glad you asked. The first Dragon Ball Z anime movie we licensed at Manga was 2014's Battle of Gods, which I'm sure you remember was the one Toriyama used to introduce the world to the Dragon Ball Super storyline. That deal was a whole other level of difficulty. Why? Because Toei didn't own the international sales and distribution rights. 20th Century Fox did!

You might think that the worst thing about the 2009 live-action adaptation Dragonball: Evolution was the movie itself. It wasn't. The worst thing that came out of the relationship between Toei and Fox was the one-sided deal the two parties agreed to in order to close the co-production agreement. I don't know if the final signature happened over a drunken night of kampai, but someone at Toei put their signature to a deal that gave Fox the exclusive global sales and distribution rights to any subsequent Dragon Ball-related movies following Evolution's release, and that included any anime movies as well. I sincerely doubt that any Japanese IP owner would ever enter into such a one-sided agreement as this ever again. You live, you learn, though, right?

The reason Dragon Ball Z Battle of Gods came out nearly a year after its Japanese theatrical release is that it took 12 months to negotiate a licensing deal with Fox, who were lovely to deal with, but I couldn't believe that we had to go through them to secure the distribution rights to a Japanese-language anime movie in the first place. The surprising theatrical and home video success of Battle of Gods made it hard for us to negotiate for Resurrection F, which was released only 12 months later. We had a very short turnaround time to negotiate a license agreement with Fox to acquire the assets and commence marketing. Resurrection F was a massive hit, but it wouldn't have been possible in the UK if we hadn't had the support of other international distribution partners who also released the movie. That included Funimation in the US and Madman in Australia. We worked together very closely, sharing assets to hit our deadlines and deliver the best possible experience we could for the Dragon Ball fanbase.

It was difficult, but it was also fun and immensely gratifying. Those Dragon Ball movies completely changed the face of theatrical distribution for anime movies, not just in the UK but across Europe, the Americas, and Australia. They were the first Dragon Ball-related anime to find their way onto Sky Cinema and Netflix in the UK, too, following the home video release. These movies transformed theatrical releasing for anime from an art-house cinema experience that nobody went to into nationwide, sold-out multiplex releases. No anime movie released in the UK has enjoyed that type of recognition or commercial success since the early 2000s and the release of the first Pokémon movie by Universal Pictures.

I think that another positive outcome from my Toei Animation Dragon Ball Z journey and close collaboration with our friends Funimation and Madman is that when Sony acquired Funimation in 2017 and started making their plans for global domination, it made perfect sense for Funimation to bring Madman and Manga Entertainment into the fold. Madman had been acquired by Aniplex by that stage, in 2018. Manga was the last to the party, closing its sale in April 2019. All that Dragon Ball-related frustration led to the consolidation of most of the Western world's anime distribution under the Sony/Crunchyroll umbrella, which has led to the inevitable corporatization of anime licensing and distribution. I guess it also led to my working myself out of a job. But! If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be able to sit here now to tell you about my epic quest.

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