We reported last month that Warner Bros had shut down the animation studio Rooster Teeth after 21 years of operation — not all those years were under WB ownership, but that’s the risk you take when you let yourself get eaten by a huge corporation that sees you as a number on a ledger. The silver lining, we learned today, is that not everything RT produced is dead.
With Anime Expo came the announcement that the studio’s flagship series, RWBY, has now been picked up by VIZ Media and will continue under their banner. Series co-creator Kerry Shawcross came on stage to reveal the show’s rescue.
“In talking with Viz, they’re also very excited about this,” says Shawcross. “They obviously care about where the show is now, but they also care about where it came from. And they want to make sure that we can continue this story.”
RWBY is an American-grown anime series that’s been in production off-and-on for over a decade. Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, and Yang Xiao Long are four huntresses who protect the world of Remnant. They collectively form the acronym that is the series name.
Keep in mind Viz has not officially announced a new season of RWBY — it is currently not in production, but it’s now a lot more likely to happen than it was two weeks ago. Viz says they are “exploring the production of new chapters in the RWBY saga.”
Does that mean television, or manga? Viz does have a past history with this series; they’ve published manga side-stories and spinoffs of RWBY for many years. Guess we’ll see what happens.
The fate of all other Rooster Teeth properties is unknown. Red Vs. Blue pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit” with a series finale, and as for gen:Lock, it was kind of dead before RT was.
