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NEWS: Live-Action Rurouni Kenshin 'Final Chapter' Films Cast Mackenyu as Enishi

As Watsuki is still rights holder for Kenshin, I can not in good conscience support this film. Nor do I wish to see it licensed in the west. I personally hope it bombs and that we won’t hear from him again for a long time.

dragon695 wrote:

As Watsuki is still rights holder for Kenshin, I can not in good conscience support this film. Nor do I wish to see it licensed in the west. I personally hope it bombs and that we won’t hear from him again for a long time.

What about all the people involved in the making of the movie? The ones actually making it, who are devoting their blood, sweat, tears, & time to making this, a project intended for the fans who supported them through all the years?

Do they deserve it have it bomb on them?

Scion Drake wrote:

dragon695 wrote: As Watsuki is still rights holder for Kenshin, I can not in good conscience support this film. Nor do I wish to see it licensed in the west. I personally hope it bombs and that we won’t hear from him again for a long time. What about all the people involved in the making of the movie? The ones actually making it, who are devoting their blood, sweat, tears, & time to making this, a project intended for the fans who supported them through all the years? Do they deserve it have it bomb on them?

Yep. Maybe they should've worked on another project.

If you give money to this, you risk giving money to someone who is gonna support the child porn industry. This isn't a case of art from artist, it's a thing that causes actual harm.

If you give money to this, you risk giving money to someone who is gonna support the child porn industry.

To tell the naked truth, regardless of how many people watch the film or how much the gross earnings are, not a single yen goes to the author. We are only paid an upfront license fee. The amount we’re paid is peanuts in comparison to the overall box office gross. The majority of the profits go to filthy unscrupulous companies such as Shueisha [...] Releasing individual manga volumes is way more profitable.

I have no plans to see this movie, but:

CharonCaori wrote:

If you give money to this, you risk giving money to someone who is gonna support the child porn industry.

My understanding is that under Shueisha's standard contract, manga artists do not receive royalties from live-action movie adaptations. Per fellow Jump artist Sorachi Hideaki, they get absolutely nothing but the one-time payment for the film rights:

Sorachi Hideaki wrote:

To tell the naked truth, regardless of how many people watch the film or how much the gross earnings are, not a single yen goes to the author. We are only paid an upfront license fee. The amount we’re paid is peanuts in comparison to the overall box office gross. The majority of the profits go to filthy unscrupulous companies such as Shueisha [...] Releasing individual manga volumes is way more profitable.

There is certainly a chance that the manga will get new sales if the movie is popular...but that's far from a sure thing, given that any potential readers will get lots of results like "serialization suspended because of the author's awful crimes" when they search for the title.

Sadly life is more complex than that. You can't black & white it like a child.

I love Kenshin, it's an important story to me but I'm just never going to pay for anything related to it again until the author is dead.

Not wanting to give someone money because he might spend that money on child pornography isn't being childish. I think he should have been blacklisted from the manga industry.

While nearly all of us would agree that child pornography is vile, arguing that someone is “worthy of capital punishment” for a crime that was apparently possessing pornographic DVDs that were LEGAL in Japan less than a decade ago is a bit over the top, isn’t it? The Japanese legal system punished Watsuki and no doubt he’s lost money - perhaps millions of dollars - from VIZ cancelling the Hokkaido arc from NA release. Why do people who have not even viewed the evidence in the case think they know better than the prosecutors who pursued the case against Watsuki? That’s a lynch mob mentality not the rule of law.

There is certainly a chance that the manga will get new sales if the movie is popular...but that's far from a sure thing, given that any potential readers will get lots of results like "serialization suspended because of the author's awful crimes" when they search for the title.