In one of the bigger and more surprising moves in relation to the One Piece acquisition saga in awhile, Manga Entertainment UK has gone forward on their own to acquire the first ten One Piece feature films. The announcement came this weekend at the MCM Birmingham Comic Con where they announced a planned June 30th, 2014 release for One Piece: Strong World, which will be getting a DVD and Blu-ray release.
They then followed up this announcement by saying that they’ve acquired the rights to the first nine movies as well. They didn’t provide details about what formats these will be released on, and that’s admittedly up in the air since outside of the 8th movie, none of them have dubs. Manga UK will be releasing films one through seven and nine in its original Japanese language only with English language subtitles. The eighth movie was previously released in North America by FUNimation and got both a DVD and Blu-ray release, so that release will at least be bilingual.
The acquisition is interesting as fans have wondered for some time about what FUNimation was or was not doing with them. The pickup several years ago of the Alabasta movie was a welcome surprise, but it did not translate into them picking up either prior movies or the ninth movie. Which in turn made the pickup of Strong World a surprise. With Manga UK grabbing these and intending to release them subtitled only, fans in the UK can at least see them legally in the coming years, but it paints a bleak picture for US fans who are hoping that they’ll get picked up since it makes it clear in a way that Manga UK basically got tired of waiting for FUNimation to step up and do it so they could be dubbed and released overseas.
Check out the trailers below for the first ten features of One Piece goodness:
