Franchise Killer/Anime and Manga

Examples of this in Anime/Manga franchises

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• El Hazard: The Alternative World performed poorly to the point that it was Cut Short with the show's way too many plots being wrapped up (very poorly) in only a single episode. It also killed the El Hazard franchise, with no further work of any kind being done in the decade since. And we never saw the Stable Time Loop established in the original El Hazard: The Magnificent World through to its completion.
  • Tenchi Muyo!, another AIC franchise of the same era, barely escaped this fate one year earlier with Tenchi in Tokyo. Despite being in most regards worse than El Hazard: The Alternative World, Tenchi in Tokyo managed to last for a full 26 episodes, and only set back the franchise by 5 years instead of killing it altogether.
• Post-Chars Counterattack, Mobile Suit Gundam's Universal Century continuity entered an agonizing death-spiral. This started off with Mobile Suit Gundam F91 being developed as a TV series, but crammed into a movie loaded with so many dangling plot threads that it took a manga-only sequel to resolve them all. The next series, Victory Gundam, was Yoshiyuki Tomino's gigantic middle-finger to the franchise before departing. However, the true death blow was when Gaia Gear and G-Saviour were produced; Sunrise does not list them with other UC productions, and OVAs about the Universal Century mostly stopped as a result of them, prior to the release of Unicorn. While the continuity continued to live on in OVAs covering events from the One Year War to the Gryps conflict, every subsequent TV production has been in an Alternate Continuity, and the UC timeline didn't really progress any further beyond V Gundam - even after Gundam Unicorn and the Animated Adaptation of the MSG manga, Gundam: The Origin , were very successful. The only attempts of additional UC works set after Victory were Reconguista in G (which is set so far ahead in the UC that the calendar has been changed to the Reglid Century) released in 2014, 14 years after G-Saviour, & the Shin Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam Dust manga, which wasn't released until 2021, 21 years after G-Saviour and is still set before it. The newest UC projects (as of 2023) are the three Hathaway's Flash movies (the first one was released in 2021), which are adaptations of Gundam novels set post-Counterattack, as well as a 2022 OAV based on the infamous Cucuruz Doans Island episode of the original series, though a larger brand initiative to revive the Universal Century has been launched, though so far they have had little connection with F91-onwards.
  • This probably has something to do with the fact that Tomino was planning on ending it with Counterattack (in fact, he'd never even wanted to do any sequels in the first place, as his original plan had been to kill off pretty much any future threat from Zeon), but his sponsors just kept trying to squeeze blood from the stone. It's very telling that when they finally wised up and let Tomino bow out of the franchise and hired directors who were actually enthusiastic about the material they produced some of the most highly regarded work not only in the Gundam franchise, but in all of '90s anime.
  • Gundam X almost killed the franchise, as due to consumer fatigue, the series entered an ice age for 3 years (if you don't count Endless Waltz). Gundam X is one of only two Gundam TV series to be cut short of a full two-season run. The first? The original Mobile Suit Gundam; it's easy to forget given what a massive franchise it's become that the original installment had poor ratings, and it was only redeemed by how well its toy line sold.
  • In America, Gundam SEED killed the franchise for quite a while. In this case, one can blame the heavy edits Toonami made. Desperate to air the show in a daytime slot, Cartoon Network's cuts turned the show into a complete mess, most notably by forcing the series to Never Say "Die", drastically changing battle scenes, and featuring the use of the notorious "Disco Guns". In spite of the show's serious nature, the bizarre and drastic edits caused the fanbase to not take the show seriously and it showed in the ratings. By episode 26, the series could only be seen at Friday at midnight. After its shaky run, Gundam would go back to being only seen on DVD until Sy Fy revived the franchise by airing Mobile Suit Gundam 00.
    • Its sequel Gundam SEED Destiny managed to kill Sunrise's official English-language Gundam message board (the centerpiece of the English language website), despite not even airing outside of Japan until years later (and even then, it only aired in Canada). Numerous American fans were watching fansubs of the SEED Destiny episodes within days of their air dates (or even sooner in the case of American fans who speak Japanese, which in the Gundam fandom, turns out to be a surprisingly large number) and thus it was the biggest topic of discussion the message board (without, of course, the fansub aspect being mentioned; it was the official message board after all). The extremely divided fan opinion about SEED Destiny is well known, but the disagreements were kept mostly civil. And then the final episode aired, and the opinions voice on the message board were almost universally (and often quite vehemently) negative, even among those who'd generally approved of the way the story had gone in the second half. Shortly afterward (and without advance notice), Sunrise pulled the plug on the message board entirely, leaving Gundam Official.com little more than an empty shell that to this day no longer gets updated (when Gundam 00 aired on Sy Fy, it was given its own separate English-language website). In fact, given that the SEED Destiny finale aired in Japan less than six months after the SEED finale aired in North America (many Gundam fans, especially those newly-introduced to the franchise, went straight from watching SEED in English to watching fansubs of SEED Destiny), this incident may have even played a role in Gundam's long disappearance from American TV broadcasts, with Sunrise having for years the mistaken conclusion that negative reaction to the SEED Destiny finale meant that Americans just didn't like Gundam.
  • A movie meant to tie up the Cosmic Era timeline had been stuck in Development Hell for years (due to the declining health of the head writer, who finally passed away in 2016), and its fate was uncertain until Takanori "TM Revolution" Nishikawa (the singer for several of the show's openings, who also played a small role in SEED Destiny) confirmed that it restarted development on 2022, leading to a 2024 release to massive success. Previously, a combination of the failure of SEED Destiny and the combination of the success and lack of immediate follow up to 00 (due to the poor reception of the follow-up movie) put the kibosh on the idea of creating a large-scale timeline as an alternative to the UC until the success of The Witch From Mercury, and even then it only revived the Cosmic Era as a result.
  • SD Gundam Sangokuden Brave Battle Warriors marks the final installment for the BB Senshi Sangokuden franchise, leaving the third part of the manga completely unadapted until 2019. Build Fighters overtook the series’s position as “kid friendly Gundam” for the most part. Meanwhile in the West, SD was killed in its cradle with the failure of Superior Defender Gundam Force, as a result there have been no efforts to bring over future SD works aside from the kits themselves, though there do exist official releases of later works with subtitles. Force failed even in Japan (though it was an international co-production to an extent), and so is essentially disowned by Bandai, much like G-Saviour.
  • In Japan itself, Gundam AGE was so unpopular due to its Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy and its contrast with the "kiddie"-like looks that it DID almost kill the franchise until the arrival of the more light-hearted Gundam Build Fighters. Regardless, it was the last non-Build Fighters, non-Universal Century work until Iron-Blooded Orphans, leaving about a 1-year gap. Speaking of which, the poor reception to Gundam Build Divers led to Re-Rise becoming an original net animation rather than a television series, and while Re-Rise did well, subsequent follow-ups were poorly received, making just enough moolah to keep going while the more serious Gundam series took center stage once again, themselves not being quite as profitable as before, with both Reconguista in G and Iron Blooded Orphans noted as having underperformed to an extent, and having quite a few gaps between them. And while Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury has done very well, it remains to see if it will fully revitalize the Gundam franchise or not.
• The Animated Adaptation of CLAMP's Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle came to a screeching halt after a lackluster second season that had almost nothing but Filler episodes (when there was so much more material left to adapt). They tried to Retcon it in the Tokyo Revelations OVA (the adaptation of the Acid Tokyo arc in the manga), but the damage had already been done.
• Zoids: Fuzors is often accused of being one of these by the English-speaking Zoids fanbase, but it was in fact the fan favourite Zoids: Chaotic Century that killed the franchise, having gotten such low ratings during its run on Cartoon Network that it was cancelled, with the final four episodes only being shown after complaints from the fanbase. Fuzors was more of a last-ditch effort to salvage what was already a doomed franchise.
  • Similarly, in Japan, Zoids Genesis was a franchise killer; the anime got a so-so reception, but The Merch failed to sell, effectively dooming the chances of another Zoids anime being made any time soon, and causing Tomy to change its marketing strategy by pandering exclusively to Otaku rather than general audiences as they did before. They would not produce a new series for general audiences until Wild, which while successful, bombed in the West due to being “kiddie” due to the Bowdlerization of the dub alongside the art style.
  • A testament to that is that Zoids is one of the Hasbro franchises that WASN'T brought back from hibernation for the Hasbro Comic Universe, though this may have been due to rights issues, as a number of obscure Hasbro IP made cameo appearances.
• In a similar vein to El Hazard: The Alternative World, Great Dangaioh's performance was bad enough to have the show get cancelled and leave things hanging in episode 12 (out of a planned 26). This effectively ensured that the Dangaioh franchise would never get a proper ending (let alone resolve the OVA's events).
• Sailor Moon had not one, but two franchise killers happen. The first was Sailor Moon Sailor Stars, which suffered from rapidly-declining ratings and brought the original anime to an end after exactly 200 episodes. Six years later, a live-action version of the show ensured that no new Sailor Moon material would be produced until 2012, when Sailor Moon Crystal was announced.
• Pretty Cure seems to avoid this trope. The Splash Star season, had the same situation as Sailor Moon Sailor Stars (suffering from rapidly-declining ratings) and this ended the duo that made popular since Futari Wa. Then, almost nine years later... Happiness Charge Pretty Cure suffered from rapidly-declining ratings and as a result, Toei Animation forced to do a massive revamp of the Pretty Cure system starting with Go! Princess Pretty Cure.
• Digimon was first taken out by Frontier, a Henshin Hero series that abandoned the partner Digimon concept and proved to be an unpopular move, and it was screwed over even further in international markets. The franchise didn't produce a new TV series until 2006, though manga (which ended in 2003 due to the failure of Frontier), cards (which ended in 2005), 2 new series of v-pets, video games and even a TV movie were still made. Savers wasn't big enough to avoid another three-year gap for the next series, and in 2012, an even worse Franchise Killer came up in the form of Young Hunters, a series with such awful reception and sales that the entire franchise had an audience shift afterwards. The next TV series have been a spin-off series called Digimon Universe: Applimonsters and a remake of the original series (and a whopping eight years elapsed between Hunters and the remake, the longest gap (even if filled by many other products) in the series to date). We wouldn't get a proper new series until Ghost Game nearly a decade later.
• As mentioned in Western Animation subpage, Transformers Go pretty much killed off any Transformers series in Japan that wasn’t a simple gag series for 10 years.

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