Highlights
- The Scarlet Bullet, the 23rd film in the Detective Conan franchise, had a delayed release due to the COVID-19 pandemic but still achieved success in its Asian theatrical run.
- The film revolves around kidnappings on the eve of the World Sports Games and follows Detective Conan as he investigates the connection to an advanced Japanese bullet train.
- Producer TMS Entertainment sees a renewed interest in the franchise, with events like the Anime NYC screening highlighting the global appeal of Detective Conan.
Case Closed, popularly known internationally as Detective Conan, is one of the most iconic franchises in Japanese pop culture. With 25 theatrical films produced over the course of 25 years, the adventurous exploits of the kid-detective are something of a yearly tradition in Japan.
After an initial premiere of both the English sub and dub versions of the film at Anime NYC last weekend, the film arrives on digital video-on-demand VOD on Monday, November 20, 2023. Now, producer TMS Entertainment is bringing one of the most ambitious films in the franchise has finally become available for international audiences—with some adventures in how it got there itself.
As the 23rd entry in the mystery-based Case Closed franchise, The Scarlet Bullet was initially planned for a release in 2020, although that release in Japan was pushed back to 2021 following the COVID-19 pandemic. This is especially fitting given that much of The Scarlet Bullet’s plot revolves around a fictionalized version of the planned 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were pushed back to 2021 due to the pandemic as well.
Focused on a series of prominent kidnappings on the eve of the World Sports Games, Detective Conan and his team are set to uncover how the crimes are connected to an advanced Japanese bullet train.
Despite the delayed release at a time when theatrical releases were still being impacted by the pandemic, The Scarlet Bullet was very successful in its initial Asian theatrical run, earning over 1.5 million Japanese ticket sales in its first theatrical week, outgrossing another iconic anime franchise in Evangelion 3.0, and earning a final gross of over $33 million USD in China as well.
TMS Entertainment sees the 2020s as a period of renewed interest in the juggernaut franchise, with events like the Anime NYC screening, which gathered hundreds of attendees at the convention, continuing to show the appeal of Case Closed around the globe.
Producing a film on essentially a yearly basis for 25 years (in addition to its 31 seasons worth of televised anime episodes), there’s a lot of Detective Conan content to go through. Although The Scarlet Bullet was released in 2021, there have been two other Case Closed films released in Japan since then, The Bride of Halloween in 2022 and The Black Iron Submarine in 2023. While specific timeframes on the localization of these films are still pending, The Black Iron Submarine’s director, Yuzuru Tachikawa, has remained hot in the theatrical anime scene with his musical anime adaptation, Blue Giant, being distributed in North America by indie animation label GKIDS.
Case Closed: The Scarlet Bullet is out now on digital video-on-demand (VOD) on iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, and Google Play.