It looks like Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP’s success has led to the franchise now set on a path to realize its potential.
The original Lollipop Chainsaw was the best-selling game ever made by Grasshopper Manufacture. While it was mainly known as another Suda51 project from his peak in the 200s, it also earned belated significance as a collaboration between Suda51 and a pre-DC Studios James Gunn. Gunn revealed in an interview that the game inspired him in his characterization of DC’s Harley Quinn, especially her ‘Harley-vision’ fight scenes.
In 2023, Dragami Games surprised everyone when they revealed they acquired the Lollipop Chainsaw IP from Kadokawa Games, and bringing it back as Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP. Dragami would scale back the project from a full remake to a remaster. But they were able to deliver an appealing package with all sorts of features, including 4K and a streamer friendly RePOP mode.
While Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP received mixed reviews and valid customer complaints, it surprised everyone by becoming a huge commercial success. And now, that success has exceeded to expand the franchise’s future.
As reported by Automaton, Dragami Games has announced that they are launching multiple new Lollipop Chainsaw projects. To this end, Dragami and parent company Extreme are working with Nada Holdings, a Taiwanese investment company that specializes in producing transmedia projects across anime, video games, etc. As Dragami also confirmed, Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP sold 1.5 million units to date. And so, they hope that these new projects will “create new value while upholding the spirit and appeal of the original.”
This unlikely revival of the franchise certainly came about in the unlikeliest of circumstances. Suda51 lost connection to Lollipop Chainsaw after Grasshopper Manufacture left Kadokawa Games. The IP remained with Kadokawa Games, and it would be Yoshiki Yasuda, who was one of its executive producers, who bought the IP out from Kadokawa to bring it to Dragami/Extreme.
In the same way that Yasuda originally pitched Lollipop Chainsaw to WB Games to get it greenlit into production, Yasuda overlooked production of Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP. As he hoped, all this effort led to a successful revival of the franchise. And so last April 2 of this year, Yasuda surprised fans one last time by stepping down from Dragami Games.
In Yasuda’s words:
With the success of Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, the company has been put on a stable path, and so I believe that now would be the perfect time for me to retire from management.
We’re hopeful for Lollipop Chainsaw’s future and we certainly hope that Dragami and Nada Holdings can make new impossible things happen for the franchise. For example, we imagine that Suda51 and James Gunn would love to be involved in the franchise again in some way. Gunn would be in a great position to make a blockbuster Hollywood Lollipop Chainsaw movie, and we’re curious what Suda51 would do if he could now write the story aside from working on the game design of a Lollipop Chainsaw 2.
But really, the world is now Juliet’s oyster, and we think there’s also a lot of potential in new Lollipop Chainsaw games, movies, anime, etc. made by new creators too. We can only hope this revival bears fruit to a real lasting success as well, but for that we can only wait to see what the future holds for Juliet Starling.
