Is there really such a thing as a "surprise hit" in

>>150255267
Nichijou was a surprise flop
Madoka Magica was a surprise hit

nichijou shouldn't be a surprise flop
the fans in japan were pretty much females in their 20s that didn't watch much anime
it's a series for babbies both there and the west

There weren't high expectations for YOI going into this season, but it's blown up. On the other hand Drifters was probably the most hyped show and it hasn't really lived up to that.

GEASS

>>150255267
Yuri on Ice? It had little hype before the season.

>>150255569
Nah, Madoka got a lot of attention before it aired.

>>150255267

Watamote, its popularity caught the publisher by surprise.

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Shirobako also did better than expected, I think.

Jitsu Wa was a funny flop, and shouldn't have surprised anyone. Its low source sales were a fraction of another series, and its BD sales pretty much ended at the same fraction. Just makes me laugh at the circlejerkers here who try so hard to give it applause.

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It may seem hard to believe now, but the Haruhi LNs were pretty obscure right up until Haruhiism exploded.

>>150256232
>being so dumb that you genuinely care about japanese sales of anime as an indicator of quality

Fat retard.

>>150255267
If you were not a newfag you would have experienced the dark horse sales already.

>>150256103
Yeah, Fall 2014 had Shirobako and Yuki Yuna as the darkhorse shows.

>>150256232
They fucked up the designs, I'm a fan of the manga and even I didn't like the anime.

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>>150255955

I should clarify, the popularity of the Watamote manga was a surprise. The anime didn't do so well.

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>>150255267
Yes, OP.
Osomatsu-kun as a recent (in the past 2 years) example.

>>150255267
>People not calling OP out for being literally retarded.
Shame

>>150256407
>>150256530
It's even more amusing when the same silly excuses pop up. Feel free to like whatever you want, but it's interesting how some of these posts can whine pretty much similarly to those butthurt about whatever general that got spanked by mods.

>>150256747
>excuses
What are you talking about?

>>150255267
This is one of the dumbest questions I've ever seen anyone ask.
Nobody expected One Piece to be popular when it first came out. A more recent example would be Girls und Panzer nobody expected it to be as good as it was.

>>150255267
Konosuba was a surprise hit. It was just a run of the mill Isekai comedy. Nobody expected it to be so popular.

Yeah here's one.
JIBUN WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

>>150256724
OP is retarded but the subject is interesting. What series were much more popular than the creators expected?

Evangelion with its cut in budget was more successful than they probably thought.

>>150257493
>This is one of the dumbest questions I've ever seen anyone ask.
>Nobody expected One Piece to be popular when it first came out.
Typical condescending anon response that's dead wrong.

By the time the anime aired, One Piece had already surpassed Kenshin and nearly tied Conan as the best selling manga in Japan. Also given the same Wednesday evening timeslot that DB/DBZ/DBGT had.

Are the surprise hits always shows with cute girls or impactful tweests?

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>>150258064
>Konosuba was a surprise hit. It was just a run of the mill Isekai comedy. Nobody expected it to be so popular.

Doubly a surprise, because Konosuba was a Studio Deen show, yet they did a pretty good job on it.

Wish I could say the same for Log Horizon S2.

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Kimi no Na wa. Expected to turn a modest profit, ended up being the fourth most successful animated film in Japan ever, surpassed only by Studio Ghibli's films.

>>150258322
One Piece got old fast

>>150258064
>Konosuba was a surprise hit.
Konosuba is LN series

>>150260419
According to Wikipedia it still has a long way to go before it beats Frozen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_in_Japan

Gundam, the grandfather of real robot anime. The show was shit, planned for 4 cours, cut down to 3 in production because miserable ratings. No one expected it to survive. But the merchandise started to sell like crazy. So far the franchise has generated 80 billion yen revenue.

>>150258322
I wasn't talking about One Piece's anime.

Obviously when an extremely popular manga/VN/LN/Whatever gets an anime adaptation the resulting anime is expected to also be popular.

>>150261299
>I wasn't talking about One Piece's anime.
>Obviously when an extremely popular manga/VN/LN/Whatever gets an anime adaptation the resulting anime is expected to also be popular.

Well then you either didn't read or weren't actually answering OP's question that you insulted:

>Is there really such a thing as a "surprise hit" in anime that no one expected? Or does everyone already know from manga/novel/game

>>150256683
You can't call Osomatsu a surprise hit.

It was good, but it is one of the most popular brands in Nihon. It was THE thing people remember from childhoods.

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>>150261762
I don't think anyone expected it to be such a runaway success with fujoshi though.
Which is a bit of a shame since it had really cute girls.

>>150256059

Girls Und Panzer is a good example. Expected to be a niche military Otaku thing, does much better than expected.

>>150255818
Is Yuri on Ice this good? What can I compare it to?

>>150261811
It was really fun for the first couple episodes before the fujos took over.

>>150260731
And op asked if you could tell from LN sells if an adaptation would be popular and they certainly didn't expect it to do anywhere near as well as it did.

Yuuki Yuna, kinda.

It didn't become a massive success but it went from literally who madoka ripoff to moderate success with pretty good sales.

>>150255267
Tiger and Bunny wasn't the show that Sunrise expected to be the popular one when it aired.

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Big budget, lots of hype. It was supposed to be an Evangelion-killer. Flopped pretty hard.

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The one with savior of anime, i don't remember name, not the idol series

Was Bakemonogatari particularly popular before the anime? If anything, I don't think anyone expected it to do that well

>>150264968
That was just memeing. It didn't have the budget from the start and it didn't got very far.

>>150265162
LN was very popular already.

Love Live, the franchise

nobody went to their comiket booth and soramaru was sent a ton of overstock special editions of their first single, which sold terribly and emitsun's family bought ten copies of it to show their support for her ;________;

it wasn't until snow halation and natsuiro egao de 1 2 jump dropped that things started to slowly get noticed, and the girls had to basically promote themselves everywhere they could, by buckling down on improv skills and being compelling enough personalities to drive enough interest to bring in audience numbers to justify the expense of yet another niconama, yet another single, yet another timeslot for things like houkago love live

the music videos were kyougoku's first chief directorial effort, and aside from some storyboarding and years of 3D effects work (most of it on his own time at his parents's house using their computer when he was a student) he really didn't have much managerial experience to hang an entire series on, so he had to build up those skills from scratch as he demonstrated camera work to higher-ups and shot blocking techniques, so that when it came time for the anime phase he pretty much had to learn on the job

now look at love live, the seat-of-your-pants effort everybody had to pull off has had enough of a massive cultural shockwave throughout japanese popular culture that it's rippled up to members of the damn government seeking acts for olympic consideration

none of these things can be predicted using just money or soft influence, if the act itself doesn't resonate with an audience then it won't go nearly as far as this

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>>150255267

Girls und Panzer was a surprise hit.

Speaking of Emitsun, I don't think anyone expected her sudden rise in Japan's sex video popularity, specifically EZD183.