Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero Producer Breaks Down New Movie’s Place In Manga’s Canon

Dragon Ball Super is now making its way through theaters across Japan, and the producer behind Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero cleared up questions about how the movie fits into the canon from the manga releases! When Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero was first announced, it was revealed that Akira Toriyama actually began work on the newest movie shortly before Dragon Ball Super: Broly hit theaters. With the manga going far beyond the events of the anime as well, fans have begun to wonder where exactly the project fits into the movie’s timeline. Now the producer behind the film has explained things just a bit more.  

In an interview for Shueisha’s V-Jump magazine to celebrate the release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero and the latest chapter of the manga series (as detailed by @Cipher_db on Twitter), producer behind the film Akio Iyoku opened up about where the new movie fits into the manga’s canon. Clarifying a bit more about the timeline for the franchise overall, Iyoku explained that the anime film and the manga are actually on a “parallel” set of stories with the freedom to experiment for each release of the series. 

“Between this film and Toyotaro-sensei’s manga, we currently have two lines of Dragon Ball Super running,” Iyoku began. “To begin with, the film is written purely as a sequel to [Dragon Ball Super: Broly]. We wanted to pick up on and meet the expectations of everyone who’s stuck with Dragon Ball so far, along the lines of, ‘It’d be neat this happened,’ or ‘I hope this kind of character shows up.’” Continuing further, Iyoku then explained about how it ties into the manga releases for the series. 

“And in [V-Jump’s] pages, we have the continuing story of Goku and Vegeta. We’ll see new strong enemies show up, and new stories, and events will continue to progress,” Iyoku explained. “Of course Toriyama diligently oversees the storylines for the manga too, so it’s like we have events running in parallel. In terms of timeline placement, we try to not build things in too strictly-we’d like to leave margins in the story, to allow for a greater degree of freedom.”

Then Iyoku gives an example of how both releases can experiment, “For example, Broly himself was an anime-original character who was brought into the world of the main series by Toriyama’s own hand, and it’s precisely those kinds of margins being left in the world of the fiction that was allowed for and experiment in the first place. To put it simply, ‘Things are more interesting this way!’” 

How do you feel about Iyoku’s explanation for the movie and manga timelines? Are you hoping to see more of a crossover between the two someday? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animated and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!