The Next Dragon Ball Movie Should Be a DAIMA Sequel

A new Dragon Ball movie is definitely on the horizon, but what it will be is anyone’s guess. The Dragon Ball franchise has a consistent history of dropping steady film releases ever since the OG Dragon Ball anime first came out, and that’s something that continued well into the DBZ and Dragon Ball Super eras.

Now that the anime is back on schedule with the return of Dragon Ball Super: Beerus and the Galactic Patrol Arc, it’s only a matter of time until a new movie arrives. In fact, there have already been rumors of one being discussed behind the scenes, though it’s unlikely to see the light of day until after the Moro Saga at least. If and when that new Dragon Ball movie does arrive, it’ll be way better off for the entire franchise if it’s a continuation of DAIMA rather than of Dragon Ball Super.

Dragon Ball Super Needs to Get Back to Longer Manga Arcs

Ultimately, Dragon Ball Super’s entire foundation was built from the early DBZ sequel movies written by Toriyama, and it can never be separated from that history. The Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection of F films set the groundwork for the entire first two arcs of the Dragon Ball Super storyline.

However, it’s also worth considering how much weaker the storylines of those arcs were compared to later Dragon Ball Super manga arcs like the Moro and Granolah Sagas.

Dragon Ball Super’s early arcs worked insofar as they set the stage for what came after, but there’s no denying that the actual stories of later Dragon Ball Super Sagas were far more epic and really got back to the long, drawn-out conflicts that characterized Toriyama’s best work in DBZ. That was only possible because the Moro and Granolah arcs never had to be stuffed into a 90-minute movie package.

While Toyotarou was able to make Dragon Ball Super’s Super Hero Saga work for the manga by expanding on the story with a more extensive build-up, that arc still just never landed for readers the same. The problem was largely that Toriyama always intended for the story to be a shorter film that wrapped things up quickly, not a full saga that lasted several manga chapters.

In fact, Dragon Ball Super’s Super Hero Saga is an excellent example of everything that could go wrong with making future movies occur in the Dragon Ball Super timeline. Adapting those arcs after the fact in the manga automatically hurts the manga itself, because fans are immediately less interested in following a story that they’ve already seen before.

With the Dragon Ball Super manga’s future already uncertain, the last thing V-Jump would want to do is set Totoyarou up for failure from the very start.

DAIMA Is The Perfect Spin-off to Tell Shorter Stories in the Dragon Ball Universe

Adapting shorter movie storylines into full canonical manga and anime arcs just hasn’t worked out well for Dragon Ball Super in the past, and there’s even less chance it’d work now that Akira Toriyama won’t be the one writing the scripts. For that reason, it’s better off Dragon Ball’s new movies from now on follow a completely different path, and the series already has that path in the form of DAIMA.

While Dragon Ball DAIMA wasn’t the big DBS anime return fans wanted, it ultimately turned out to be a fun detour through the Dragon Ball universe. That’s exactly the kind of approach that works best for an anime movie.

If anything, Dragon Ball DAIMA feels like the type of series that works better in short, quick bursts, rather than in an epic, drawn-out storyline. It’s the ideal kind of lighthearted fun that fits the movie format.

And DAIMA‘s finale already left things open-ended enough to lead right into a fun movie storyline for DAIMA 2. Between the heavily teased Join Bugs, the mystery of the Super Saiyan 4 transformation, and the gag twist reveal of the Evil Eye at the end of the anime, there are innumerable plot lines for a DAIMA movie to freely explore in a shorter movie story.

Given the chronology of DAIMA, these movies could still remain semi-canon to the main DBS timeline, even while never being directly referenced in the story. At the very least, they wouldn’t have to be relegated to an “alternative universe” like the DBZ movies were because of their weird positions in the chronology.

A DAIMA movie series would really make the most sense for the Dragon Ball franchise, keeping the two anime continuations separate but also subtly interconnected. And if Toyotarou really wanted to, he could easily reference DAIMA story beats and lore details in future Super arcs, further making sense of that final addition to Akira Toriyama’s legacy.