“I can’t talk about what happened, but we were screwed” – Uzumaki producer on what went wrong with the highly anticipated anime

In a series of now-deleted posts on Bluesky, Uzumaki producer Jason Demarco shared some insight into the series’ issues.

When it was first announced earlier this year that an anime adaptation of the classic Junji Ito horror manga Uzumaki would be released this year, fans were obviously very excited, myself included. The first episode also starts off very strong, with a striking 3D look that makes you miss how fast-paced it is. But then…the second episode aired. This is really, really bad. It’s a bit surprising considering that none of this was shown in the trailer, but then again, none of this was shown in the trailer – go back and you’ll find that pretty much everything is from the first episode, all the good parts anyway.

There were some rumors as to why things turned out the way they did, and while there did appear to be staff changes for the second episode, showrunner Jason Demarco shared some insight into Bluesky (although he later deleted his post). “It’s OK, we knew this would happen,” DeMarco wrote. “I can’t talk about what happened but we were screwed and the options were A) Don’t finish and air nothing and call it a failure, B) Just finish and air the first episode and leave it incomplete or C ) running all four, we chose C out of respect for the hard work.

DeMarco continued, “It makes sense for people to be angry after waiting so long. Unfortunately, I can’t tell them who to blame…but someone is definitely at fault here and we all have to do our best. In his last post, he explained: “But a lot of people put a lot of effort into this show, and I don’t think the actions of just one or two people should be the reason it never came out. Maybe I really didn’t know it was the wrong choice, but those people had every right to be annoyed and disappointed.

Essentially, it sounds like the show’s production ended up being a mess. The show was first announced back in 2019, but has been delayed multiple times over the years. There are still two episodes to go, but based on DeMarco’s comments, we can probably expect more of the same. Perhaps this goes to show that not everything needs to adapt.