Board Thread:Anime/@comment-27321453-20200529112435/@comment-1327106-20200530001257

Attackcjc wrote:

Oh if I had my way, there be no breaks at all. But I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I'm set on split cour happening again is due to the network. It was surely NHK's decision to break season 3 into 2 parts. I can tell that cuz I've seen other networks do the same thing: take off one of their shows for a certain amount of time to give something else its time slot. It also makes sense cuz Attack on Titan was new to NHK so it wasn't that high on the list compared to other stuff that was surely on their network longer. So its kinda a given they're going to do it again, and I'm just being realistic about it now instead of being devastated later.

That's not how the majority of anime (including Attack on Titan) is handled. It's not like in the US where the network pays for the show and the network earns the money back through the advertising it sells for the timeslot. A few shows are supported by advertising and air during daylight or early evening hours (Detective Conan for example). But most air in late night time slots, like Attack on Titan.

Late night anime slots are paid for by the production committee, who buys time from the network and/or TV station. The production committee makes their money back from BD/DVD sales and merchandising (and increasingly by licensing to other countries). So when it comes to NHK, they're just selling the timeslot. They obviously have to be comfortable airing what's in the timeslot (so I get why people were concerned about censorship last season), but as long as they're comfortable with it, it doesn't matter to them whether it's Attack on Titan or twelve episodes of whale watching. Wit was part of Attack on Titan's production committee (they might not be anymore), so they would have been involved in buying a time slot.

The split cour for Season 3 was almost certainly Wit's decision. They did back to back in Season 1 and you can see the rough edges. They made a lot of fairly intensive touch-ups for the home release and we had a recap episode in the middle of the two cours, which is what studios do when they run behind schedule. That wasn't to get viewers caught up. It's literally because they needed to put something together to buy time for the next real episode to be completed.

This also means that in terms of planning, there was a whole other episode that never happened because Wit scheduled for 26 episodes, but had to blow a slot on a recap taking them down to 25. This wasn't a big deal in the first season since Wit was adding a numbers of scenes anyway that didn't happen in the manga, and it didn't hurt the viewer at all (aside from being disappointed in a recap), but from a studio perspective, they essentially paid for air time they ended up shoveling a rerun in. It's not a good use of money. Splitting cours likely gave them the breathing room they needed to avoid another recap.

MAPPA has successfully done back to back cours for multiple series without recap episodes, and every two cour show they've done to date has been back to back, so I think there's a good chance AoT's season 4 will not be split.