The company's old logo when it went under the name "MVM Films".
MVM Entertainment came into existence in 1990 as a mail order and retail shop that specialised in niche market items. It grew as did the demand for anime and manga products into the nineties, allowing the company to start licensing anime series for the United Kingdom market in 1998.[1]
Many of their releases have been jointly mastered with Australian distributors, including Madman Entertainment and Hanabee to save costs, and are therefore dual-region (Region 2 and Region 4).[citation needed] The company also won the Best Anime distributor award in the 2006 Neo Magazine Awards. MVM Entertainment had also managed to win the 2009 Best Anime Distributor award in Neo magazine amid stiff opposition from the likes of Beez and Manga Entertainment UK.
On 5 July 2018, owner Tony Allen gave an interview to The Anime Independent where he announced that MVM would begin to remove DVD from their new acquisitions in line with their partners at Sentai Filmworks and Madman Entertainment. He states:
We all suffer the same problem of minimum print runs on two formats where sales are then split across those formats and often leaving us large quantities of stock. Recent increases in costs of warehousing unsold and slow moving stock has made it all the more important to consider the hard economics of servicing two formats. It's just a repeat of the old VHS / DVD position.[3]
Up until November 2006, Funimation distributed their titles in the United Kingdom through MVM. However, in a surprise announcement, Funimation switched their British distributor to Revelation Films,[4] starting in early 2007. This move has been credited to Funimation's takeover by the Navarre Corporation, which already distributed titles via Revelation in the UK. MVM retained their licences for some series animated by studio GONZO and licensed by Funimation in North America, such as Samurai 7 and Burst Angel, since they were licensed directly from GONZO. Nevertheless, MVM's market share was damaged, and the publisher lost some of their most popular titles, including Fruits Basket (although re-licensed by MVM in late 2011) and Fullmetal Alchemist. They later lost access to Chobits when the US rights passed from Geneon USA to Funimation;[5] however, they succeeded in re-licensing it in late 2010,[6] followed by Fruits Basket and Kiddy Grade in late 2011.[7] MVM's most recent releases of Funimation-licensed titles (who have had an exclusive distribution agreement with Manga Entertainment since October 2008[8]) are Aquarion, .hack//Quantum, Shakugan no Shana, Ga-Rei: Zero, Sankarea, Is This a Zombie? and [C] – Control. On 2 January 2014, MVM had acquired Accel World, We Without Wings, and Chrome Shelled Regios anime with Accel World being released in June 2014.[9]
