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What Does This Dub Mean For Detective Conan?

At Anime NYC 2026, TMS premiered the English dub of The Million-dollar Pentagram, one of the higher-rated and more ambitious Detective Conan movies. The film encompasses some of the best aspects of the franchise, from mysterious puzzles, fun character interactions, surprising twists that arguably impact the franchise at large, and some of the best animation the series has had in recent years. However, I already reviewed the movie almost two years ago, so I wanted to take a moment to focus on how the story was adapted into English, especially considering the sheer amount of plot that needed to be adapted.

The biggest surprise for me was that this dub was not handled by Bang Zoom Studios. To those who might be unfamiliar, the English dub history of Detective Conan is a little bit complicated, as there are two dubs being done concurrently for the franchise. TMS has been working with Studio Nano recently to pump out batches of episodes in English (sometimes out of order) on platforms like Crunchyroll and Netflix. This dub cast features mostly Texas actors and even included a few returning actors from the original Funimation Case Closed dub that came out in the early 2000's. However, for the past couple of years, before this initiative existed, a few Detective Conan movies were dubbed by Bang Zoom with a mostly LA cast featuring Wendee Lee as Conan. As far as I can tell, there wasn't any early confirmation on who was going to be in charge of this dub, and I just assumed it was going to be the same LA cast. So I was shocked that this Anime NYC panel started with a special message from Molly Zhang, the recent voice of Conan, who announced that Studio Nano was adapting their first Detective Conan film.

The dub was pretty fantastic without any real quality drop despite the more ambitious project. It's funny that this release technically continues the trend of the awkward release of the dub episodes because this film introduces plot points and characters who have not shown up in those batches yet. That highlights something interesting that I'll get into in a moment, but I want to give credit to how this film's dub was handled. Not only was it great hearing Molly as Conan and Mauricio Ortiz-Segura as Kid the Phantom Thief bounce off each other due to their amazing chemistry, but I do have to give a lot of credit to Nazeeh Tarsha as Heiji. One of the drawbacks of this film was that Conan was a side character in this movie, as a majority of the focus was on Heiji since he was not only helping Conan solve this mystery, but also had a very emotional side plot about him wanting to confess his feelings to his childhood friend. All of the shouting and screaming during unique setpieces felt very genuine, and none of the dialogue scenes felt awkward. Even when it came to breaking down different types of unique Japanese terminology or historical background information. The dub even had fun with different accents, both exaggerated and subtle. The quality was definitely there, especially during the debut of some characters who had never been dubbed using this cast.

However, if you'll allow me to speculate for a moment, I feel like this dub might potentially be marking an interesting change for the franchise moving forward. The batches of episodes that TMS has been pushing with this new dub cast seem to have been successful, considering how many episodes have been released since this initiative started. I don't know the specific details regarding why TMS decided to shift over to Studio Nano for this film, but I like the implication that TMS seems to want this dub staff to be seen as the definitive English dub cast for the franchise moving forward. If these are the actors to be associated with these characters as they try to hit a more worldwide audience, then that does have exciting implications for the rest of the franchise. This is a sign that Detective Conan is truly getting more of the recognition it deserves, which could even bleed into other elements of the franchise.

I would love to eventually see a dub adaptation of Kaito Kid or other dubs for the upcoming films in the franchise. I don't know if TMS will go so far as to redub the past films, but as a Detective Conan fan, I am really excited that this seems to be another indication that Detective Conan's interest is on the rise in English-speaking countries. If this cast is at least playing a hand in that reality, then that is exciting because this type of synergy will only make it easier for more English speakers to get involved in the franchise moving forward.