A new Madhouse film, and what our 338 Madhouse entries actually hold

An original anime film, ghost, is being made at Madhouse, with Shingo Natsume attached. A teaser is out and the cast has been named: Mayu Hotta and Issei Takahashi play the leads. The announcement was reported by Anime News Network, which gives no release date, no synopsis and no other staff names.

A studio credit in a headline is a fair moment to ask what a free and legal shelf actually holds from that studio. Here is ours, unrounded.

The Madhouse shelf, counted

Our index credits 338 entries to Madhouse. All 338 of those pages were fetched from animesphere.app today, and all 338 loaded. Of that set, 14 state a free episode on the live page, and those 14 state 103 free episodes between them. Six of the fourteen state exactly one free episode.

Our own database, queried separately, reported 13 entries and 102 episodes. The live pages are the higher figure, and the live pages are what a reader opens, so 14 and 103 are the numbers we are using. We are not going to guess at why the count is 14 rather than some other figure. We do not know, and the answer is not in our data.

Two of them are worth naming here.

Boogiepop Phantom, 12 of 12

Our index records this as a television series from 2000 with 12 episodes, tagged Drama, Horror, Mystery, Psychological and Supernatural. Its page states 12 free episodes against those 12 recorded, so the free run reaches the final one. All twelve uploads sit on the channel It's Anime powered by REMOW, and the page describes the audio as Japanese.

The watch pages for episodes 1 and 12 each report an authored English subtitle track alongside an automatic Japanese caption track: Japanese audio with a real English subtitle track, not an English dub. Those two episodes run 1,443 and 1,413 seconds against a recorded episode length of 24 minutes, which is to say they are full episodes rather than clips. The rows allow Canada and the United States.

Magic User's Club, 13 of 13

Our index records the television series from 1999 with 13 episodes, tagged Comedy, Mahou Shoujo, Romance and Sci-Fi. Its page states 13 free episodes against those 13 recorded, so this run also reaches the last episode. The uploads sit on the channel Nozomi Entertainment, which posts every episode twice.

The watch pages for episodes 1 and 13 report no caption track at all. The subtitled uploads instead carry their English subtitles in the picture: a frame taken from the middle of episode 1 shows the line "N-No way...", burned into the image, with a NOZOMI watermark in the corner. Episodes run between 1,494 and 1,504 seconds against a recorded length of 24 minutes.

Those are the two we would point at today.