ADV Films

» see advfilms.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Houston, Texas is where the american anime business lived for most of two decades, and i had no idea. In 2003 i was in an internet cafe in Ankara paying by the hour, and if a japanese show had english subtitles on it, that felt like weather. Somebody in a building off Highway 59 had negotiated for it, paid for it, hired the voices and pressed the discs, and none of that was visible from where i sat.

A.D. Vision opened on 17 august 1992. John Ledford started it with two partners, Matt Greenfield and David Williams, and the first release came out in december of that year: Devil Hunter Yohko, on VHS, into a market that barely existed. What ADV worked out early is that the bottleneck in anime outside Japan was never demand. It was the license. Somebody had to fly to Tokyo, buy North American rights to a specific show, and then eat the cost of dubbing it.

For fifteen years ADV was the company that mostly did that. Neon Genesis Evangelion reached english speakers through ADV. So did a long list of things people now assume simply existed. It was a distributor, so its name sat in small type on the back of the box, and its actual power was that it picked which shows crossed the ocean at all.

It kept expanding into everything adjacent. Anime Network launched on cable in late 2002. Newtype USA, an american edition of the japanese magazine, debuted in november 2002. ADV Manga and ADV Music both started in 2003, and the UK division had been open since 1996.

~ the dossier ~

~ the machine ~

The economics were harsh and everybody in the business knew it. You paid for a license up front against sales you could not predict, then paid again for a dub, and you did all of that before a single disc moved. Get the show right and you funded the next five. Get it wrong and the write-off sat on your books for years.

DVD made the model work for a while, because the format let a distributor sell the same episodes again to people who already owned the tapes. That window closed faster than anyone planned for. The 24/7 Anime Network cable service stopped on 4 january 2008 and an online version replaced it, which was the correct call about where things were going and did not generate anything like the same money.

~ january 2008 ~

Sojitz Corporation had taken a 20 percent stake in june 2006 through an investment group, with a subsidiary putting up money for ADV to go and buy new licenses with. For eighteen months that is what happened.

Then in january 2008 ADV quietly pulled a large number of titles off its own website with no explanation, and everybody noticed that the missing ones were exactly the shows acquired since the Sojitz deal. Ledford eventually confirmed that the partner had withdrawn its financial support along with several of the licenses. In july 2008 Funimation announced it had picked up more than thirty of them, including series ADV had not finished releasing. ADV sued Sojitz and its subsidiary over the contract, then withdrew the suit, and the numbers it had paid for twenty-nine of those titles ended up in the court file anyway.

The magazines went in the same stretch. The final Newtype USA came out in february 2008. Its replacement, PiQ, launched in may and was canceled in june after four issues.

~ what it became ~

On 1 september 2009 the company announced it was ceasing all operations, and the same announcement explained where everything had gone. The catalog and the functions were divided across five separate firms: Section23 Films for distribution, Sentai Filmworks holding the licensing, AEsir Holdings on rights, Seraphim Digital doing the production and dubbing work, and Valkyrie Media Partners. Same people in a lot of cases, same building, different corporate paper.

Which is why the death does not feel like one from the outside. Sentai kept licensing and Section23 kept shipping discs, so the work continued under names nobody had heard of the week before. The legal tail ran on for years too: Funimation sued ADV and the related companies in january 2012 over the Sojitz licensing, and it settled in may 2014 with the terms undisclosed. The company was gone by then. The argument about who owned what outlasted it by half a decade.

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