Viz Media Acquires 'RWBY' Following Rooster Teeth Shutdown
Another franchise will live on following the cuts at Warner Bros. Discovery
Back in March, it was revealed that Warner Bros. Discovery would be shutting down Rooster Teeth, which had been in operation for over 20 years due to “challenges facing digital media resulting from fundamental shifts in consumer behavior and monetization across platforms, advertising, and patronage." Options for shopping its animated webshows, namely RWBY and Red vs. Blue, began to be explored. The 19th and final season of the latter became an 87-minute feature Red vs. Blue: Restoration, released May 7, a little over a week before Rooster Teeth’s official May 15 closure. While Red vs. Blue may be over, RWBY has seemingly gotten its reprieve, as Viz Media announced at their Anime Expo panel Friday that they have acquired the franchise.
Not only will they now own the rights for future distribution, production, licensing, and consumer products, but continuation of the series with new chapters is being explored. Created by the late Monty Oum, RWBY follows four girls armed with unique weapons and powers who are training to hunt supernatural "Creatures of Grimm”. Rooster Teeth produced nine volumes and 117 episodes. The ninth volume ran from February to March 2023, ending on March 30. Announcements about new episodes will be made as soon as possible, and Kerry Shawcross, series showrunner and co-creator, will be involved. Wider distribution for the series, including home video releases, additional streaming platform releases, and more for the original nine volumes are being explored.
Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Jason Saldaña, Gus Sorola, and Joel Heyman founded Rooster Teeth in April 2003. How it became vulnerable to the business whims of Warner Bros. Discovery was that Fullscreen, part of AT&T's Otter Media, acquired Rooster Teeth in November 2014. Otter Media was founded just 7 months earlier and owned Crunchyroll at the time, which would be sold to Sony-owned Funimation in December 2020, finalized in August 2021. Rooster Teeth became fully AT&T’s in 2018 and became a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming & Interactive Entertainment following AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner the following year, and then the merger with Discovery forming Warner Bros. Discovery in April 2022.
It’s definitely worth noting that this is an expansion of a pre-existing partnership, practically an old friend swooping in to save the day, as it began with manga. It started with Shirow Miwa's adaptation in Ultra Jump magazine, a run from November 2015 to February 2017, which had its English release in Weekly Shonen Jump magazine beginning in October 2017, with Viz publishing the manga on its own in print. The company also published the The World of RWBY compendium book. It has also been emphasized that the RWBY social media accounts will remain active and be a great source for the upcoming updates.
