Posts Tagged “4kids”

ICv2 is reporting that 4Kids has let its Pretty Cure license lapse and revert back to Toei 31 months after they gained the US rights and did absolutely bupkis with it, despite planning to debut it on their TV block in fall 2006. Now the series sits in a zone where it has not been officially released yet but has lost a lot of momentum that it had when the initial license was announced. I’m not sure who is waiting for a DVD release but in the meantime, you can try out the first two episodes via Direct2Drive - something I did a few months ago and found them to be entertaining but not fantastic.

In its February 2006 story about its 4Kids license, ICv2 said that the series “has a chance to become the first magical girl anime series since Sailor Moon to achieve popularity here in the States” (did Cardcaptors flop?) and I suppose it still could if it’s marketed the right way. By the way, if you want some recommendations of other mahou shoujo series, Chris Fritz at the Pink Sylphide wrote a post about his favorites earlier this week.

Not quite at that stage yet…

Almost everyone in the fan community dislikes 4Kids Entertainment for how they have handled titles like One Piece and some of them wish they would go out of business. Well, the company reported on Friday a $2.3 million net loss for the quarter ending December 31, 2006 and a $1.0 million loss for the year ending 12/31/06 (net gain for 2005 was $5.1 million), but they still have over $18 million in cash and $111 million in total cash and investments so they’re not going out of business in the immediate future. However, there is room for concern as their net revenue as steadily decreased over the past two years from $99.1 million in 2004 to $71.8 million in 2006.