“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. That’s a bit surprising considering none of that was shown in the trailer, but then again, none of that was shown in the trailer – go back and you’ll see that pretty much everything is from the first episode, all the good parts anyway.

There were some rumors as to why things ended the way they did, and it does seem like there were changes in staff for the second episode, but showrunner Jason DeMarco shared some insight into Bluesky (although he later deleted his post) . “It’s okay, we knew this was going to 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. “Maybe other people will make different choices and we’ll do our best.” In his final post, he explained: “But a lot of people put in a lot of effort into this show. I don’t think the actions of just one or two people should be the reason it never came out. Maybe I really don’t know it was the wrong choice, but those people have the 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.