If you have been paying attention to recent anime news, you may have noticed that Funimation is losing the rights to Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Conqueror of Shamballa very soon. They also lost the rights to Baccano! and Darker Than Black already in 2016. This means Funimation will produce no further DVD/BD releases, when the current stock is gone it is gone, and these titles will be removed from all streaming services.

FMA, Baccano!, and Darker Than Black have a strong mixture of popularity and critical acclaim, and have found big audiences in the West. So why is Funimation not renewing the licenses? All of these shows also happen to be produced by Aniplex. Depending on how you feel about these titles, this is either an interesting footnote or the start of a countdown clock.

While the Funimation physical copies of these shows will not disappear overnight, they will start to become harder to find as time goes on. When any anime or manga title goes out of print, there is a group of people who go out of their way to buy up all the copies they can find to sell at a premium price later. Look on Amazon or eBay or the like for any hard to find manga or anime that has not been license rescued; the prices are highway robbery. Now, Aniplex is probably going to release their own version of these shows in the not too distant future. Looking at the pedigree of these series makes that a pretty easy guess. But we are all pretty familiar with the Aniplex price and each of us makes our decisions on whether or not to pay it. You can get Baccano! for $25.99 from Funimation but the same series is likely to be $249.99 (give or take) from Aniplex.

Either way copies of all these shows are soon going to get very pricey. You can either pay the profiteers a jacked up price for copy of something that was once much cheaper, pay Aniplex for the fancy but expensive version, or pay with time and effort trying to hunt down reasonably priced copies at conventions or liquidation sales. At least Aniplex is fairly good at getting their titles on streaming services so hopefully fans may still have a way to see these titles but if you want to own physical copies you probably want to buy them sooner rather than later.

So basically what we’re saying is, get your copies NOWNOWNOW!