In a now deleted series of posts on Bluesky, Uzumaki producer Jason Demarco shared a bit of insight into what went wrong with the series.
When it was first announced earlier this year that the anime adaptation of the classic Junji Ito horror manga Uzumaki would finally be releasing this year, fans were obviously incredibly excited, myself included in that. The first episode started really strong too, with this striking 3D look that helped you ignore how fast paced it was. But then… the second episode aired. And it was really, really not very good. This came as a bit of a surprise considering none of this was shown in the trailers, but then again, none of this was in the trailers – go back and you’ll see pretty much everything was from the first episode, all the good bits anyway.
There are some rumours about why things ended up the way that they did, and it does seem like there was a change in staff for the second episode, but producer Jason Demarco shared some insight on Bluesky (though he has since deleted his posts). “It’s fine, we knew this would happen,” wrote Demarco. “I can’t talk about what went down, but we were screwed over, and the options were A) not finish and air nothing and call it a loss, B) Just finish and air Episode 1 and leave it incomplete or C) run all four, warts and all. Out of respect for the hard work we chose C.”
Demarco continued, “After waiting so long, it makes sense people would be mad. Unfortunately, I can’t tell them who to blame it on… but someone is definitely at fault here, and we all just had to do our best when things imploded. Maybe others would have made different choices. We did the best we could with what we had.” In his last post, he explained, “But again, a lot of people worked very hard on this show, and I didn’t think the actions of just one or two people should be the reason it never saw the light of day. Maybe that’s the wrong choice. I truly don’t know. But those people have a right to be annoyed and disappointed. I’m glad you are digging it.”
Essentially, it sounds like production on the show ended up being quite the mess. The show was first announced way back in 2019, and received multiple delays over the years. There’s still two episodes to air, but based on Demarco’s comments, we can probably expect more of the same. Maybe this is a sign that not everything needs to be adapted.
