July 4th, 2008 
AstroNerdBoy Well, as you all know by now, FUNimation will now be distributing some of Geneon’s licenses (as 
reported here). As I stated in my speculation article on whether FUNimation would get Geneon titles, this is a distribution agreement, which means that these are still Geneon titles, only with FUNimation creating the DVD’s, marketing them, and selling them.
Personally, I would have preferred for FUNimation to get the licenses outright and thus have total control over the properties. I guess that Geneon will be like Kodakawa or Enoki in that they may continue to license stuff but have others do all the work. Otherwise, why would Geneon retain the actual licenses if they don’t plan to continue to exist in some future form?
That said, with titles like Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha (and I read Nanoha A’s as well) or Shakugan no Shana (which are franchises with multiple sequel series in them) being distributed by FUNimation, does this give FUNimation a better reason to license the sequels? Or will Geneon license those, take care of the dubs/subs, and then sub-license the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution to FUNimation?
Of interest to me was the lack of Tenchi titles in the mix for FUNimation distribution. That could mean several things. It could be that FUNimation would like those licenses outright, thereby giving them the corner on the Tenchi anime market. If so, those would be a separate announcement. It could be that Geneon wanted to much money for those titles and from a business perspective, FUNimation decided against picking them up. It could be that some other company scored the distribution rights to the Tenchi titles. Obviously, I hope for a FUNimation total license with the canon Tenchi titles being sent to Tomato for re-translation from scratch.
The head of Media Blasters and Robert’s Anime Corner Store had stated or implied publicly that an R1 company wasn’t even in the running, so to be honest, I expected someone like Sony to suddenly have Geneon’s titles. Robert talks a bit about this in his blog.
Regardless, this is good news for FUNimation, so congrats to them.
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As a Tenchi fan, I’m very interested in what’s going to happen with Geneon’s Tenchi properties, but I’m sorry to say that your article here didn’t tell me anything useful about that. Do you have any solid information on what’s going on, or did you just list these various theories so that, whatever happens, you can later say that your guess was correct?
I have no solid information (no insider information here, sadly) on what will happen regarding Tenchi. Since Tenchi was not listed as part of what FUNimation picked up for a distribution sub-license, I thought I would list some possibilities of what might happen with the Geneon portion of the franchise. Whether I’m right or not remains to be seen. As a Tenchi fan, I’ll be keeping an eye open as best as I can.
Clearly, FUNimation went for the stuff that Geneon licensed and worked on just prior to bailing out of the distribution market. Since there are other good Geneon titles besides Tenchi still in limbo, maybe FUNimation (or someone else) will score those too once they see how well things go for the first batch.