'Dragon Ball' Grossed $1+ Billion for Toei, Bandai in 2018

The Dragon Ball franchise had an incredible 2018 with the end of Dragon Ball Super, the release of [...]

The Dragon Ball franchise had an incredible 2018 with the end of Dragon Ball Super, the release of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, manga, videogames like Dragon Ball FighterZ, and countless merchandise based on all of the new content from the series. Naturally, this resulted in a pretty big payday for Toei Animation.

According to new financial reports from Toei Animation and Bandai Namco, the Dragon Ball franchise raked in over $1 Billion dollars in revenue from April 2018 to March 31, 2019.

As spotted by u4004 on Reddit, the Dragon Ball franchise made Bandai Namco $293 million on the last quarter of 2018, making up 17 percent of their total sales. It was by far their biggest earning franchise. Even more surprising is that Dragon Ball outearned franchises like One Piece, Naruto, and Gundam for Bandai. As for Toei Animation, the franchise earned at least $49 million, which makes up a third of their total revenue overall.

This incredible performance from various forms of the franchise had Bandai Namco upping their early estimates to $360 million overall. As for January to December 2018, Dragon Ball earned Bandai $1.1 billion, and $171 million for Toei Animation. Details about this major revenue indicates that most of it comes from the videogames for the series like Dokkan Battle, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Dragon Ball Legends, and the Dragon Ball Heroes arcade game.

According to u4004, Toei didn't break down their earnings by franchise meaning there's no telling how much they made from the release of Dragon Ball Super: Broly, but that film's become a major hit in the worldwide box office. You can check out more of u4004's impressive breakdown here, and hope this revenue means the Dragon Ball franchise is stronger than ever.

Dragon Ball Super currently airs its English dub on Adult Swim during the Toonami programming block Saturday evenings at 11:00 p.m. It is also available to stream on Funimation and Amazon Video. The Japanese language release of the series is complete, and available to stream on FunimationNOW and Crunchyroll. The manga has chapters that can currently be read for free thanks to Viz Media. Dragon Ball Super: Broly is currently in theaters as well.

If you wanted to catch up with the English dub of the series, there's actually a pretty nifty way to do so. You can currently stream the first 91 episodes of the dub on FunimationNOW, which brings the series from the beginning all the way to when the the universes began gathering their fighters for the Tournament of Power. It's not too far off from where the Toonami run of the series is at currently.

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