The release of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero has been indefinitely postponed.
The official website for the latest Dragon Ball movie confirms that the premiere of the movie has been delayed due to the Toei Animation hack that occurred on March 6. The movie was originally scheduled to open in Japan on April 22, with a release in North America planned for sometime this summer. Toei Animation apologized to fans for the delay, but was also unable to announce a new premiere date for the highly anticipated movie.
According to Toei, an unauthorized third party accessed its private network earlier this month. The hack caused a shutdown of Toei's network, which reportedly resulted in the corruption and deletion of files related to the production of several projects. The company previously announced that three of its most popular shows, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, Digimon: Ghost Game, and the company's most popular anime, One Piece, would all be put on an indefinite hiatus. Like the Dragon Ball movie, the studio has been unable to provide a date for when these shows will return.
Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero is the 21st movie in the franchise and the second film under the Dragon Ball Super name. The movie will be the first theatrical release in the franchise to be animated entirely using CG. Super Hero features the return of one of Goku's oldest enemies, the Red Ribbon Army, and the introduction of two new antagonistic android warriors, Gamma 1 and Gamma 2. The story centers on the relationship between Gohan and Piccolo, who will debut a new, more powerful form in the film.
Toei Animation was originally founded in 1948 and is one of Japan's oldest and best known animation companies. The studio has worked on everything from Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Sailor Moon to the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Despite producing several of the biggest animated series in history, Toei has a complicated relationship with its fans in the digital age, as the studio has built a reputation for taking a somewhat draconian approach to defending its intellectual property rights online. The studio recently faced a massive backlash when it attempted to use copyright claims to pull hundreds of reviews of its shows off of YouTube. The incident forced YouTube to implement new policies in regards to how it handles fair use protections on its platform.