Madman Entertainment co-founder Tim Anderson has confirmed the creation of Sugoi Co, a new anime licensing and distribution company for the Australian market. Though the company held a soft-launch at last week’s Anime Expo convention in Los Angeles, Anderson would later confirm further business details to Anime News Network, including its merger with local brand licensor JW Brands.
The first anime in Sugio’s library is the theatrical release of The First Slam Dunk, a movie based on Takehiko Inoue’s popular basketball manga.
Anderson told ANN via email that Sugio will focus on “marketing and promotion” in Australia, with an aim to become “a portfolio kind of business.” Crucially, though there’s interest in broader media and merchandising distro, Anderson says he has no interest in being aligned with any one streaming platform. Rather, he would prefer to see each of Sugoi’s library of licensed titles find their way to platforms that “make sense” for them.
This is, seemingly, a shot across the bow at Crunchyroll, the American anime juggernaut that now sits at the centre of anime distribution around the world. Anderson co-founded Madman Entertainment with Paul Wiegard in 1996 as a mail-order anime business. In 2006, it was acquired by Funtastic for $AU34.5 million. Anderson and Wiegard, along with a group of other investors, would buy the company back in 2014. It would later sell its anime division to Sony’s Aniplex in 2019 for $AU35 million, which would itself be rolled into the wider Funimation platform. In 2020, Sony announced it was acquiring Crunchyroll from WarnerMedia and smooshing all of its anime assets together in a relaunched Crunchyroll platform.
Crunchyroll laid off numerous Australian staff earlier this year, many of them long-time Madman employees.
You can follow Sugoi on Twitter for further announcements.
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