Ask John: How Often is Japanese Live Action Released in the US?

Question:
How often do we get Japanese live action shows in the US? How often will this happen? I know we will be seeing Lovely Complex live action coming, but what about Sailor Moon? Nana? Will companies ever bring these in the United States? It seems most manga/anime are turning live action. I’m just wondering what’s the chance of seeing these titles brought here.

Answer:
Regrettably, American releases of Japanese live action genre television series or movies outside of the horror and art film realms are still pretty rare. According to the February 3rd issue of The DVD Release Report, from 1997 to 2007, Japanese language DVD releases in America accounted for only 9% of all foreign language film released on American DVD. French, Chinese, and Spanish language DVDs releases all command a larger share of American DVD releases than Japanese language titles. There’s simply not a large consumer market for live action Japanese film programming in America, and I don’t foresee that changing in the future.

American fans may see a progressive increase in manga and anime related live action film reaching America, though. If American anime DVD sales continue to decline, established American distributors may begin to broaden their range of acquisitions with live action features that still target their core consumer audience. We’ve already seen this beginning with Media Blasters’ acquisition of titles like the GTO movie, Zeiram 2, Skyhigh, and Death Trance; FUNimation’s acquisition of Shinobi; and Viz distributing films such as Love Com, the Nana movies, and the Death Note live action pictures.

I suspect that official American home video licenses for typical Japanese “dorama” programs is probably a longshot, as is any dramatic increase in domestic releases of live action sentai or tokusatsu television programs because these type of titles don’t have a potential to appeal to mainstream American consumers. However, live action adaptations of manga and anime that do have an established, receptive American consumer base of anime and manga fans may become slightly more commonplace in the future.