Chart showing Precure toy sales for each series in the franchise in billions of yen, color coded by yearly quarter

the title is mostly ribbing, but it can’t be ignored that precure has been on a slide in recent years. delicious precure was a slog to get through, as backed up by its sales and ratings being the lowest for a series yet, but it did make at least one kid eat their vegetables. parents today don’t want to see tremendous high-impact punching violence, something precure became famous for and what gave it pull with an adult crowd, yet the franchise has now also grown into a nostalgia magnet the way other toei properties before it have. so with a small but dedicated adult fanbase and a majority gradeschooler crowd that looks to be largerly shrinking year over year, does precure still have a future ahead for it? a weird one, maybe.

otona precure ‘23 was recently announced featuring the girls from yes 5, already one of the few precure series to get a sequel season prior to this point. seemingly, this is going to star familiar precure characters as adults, which is the clearest departure yet for anything wearing the precure branding, though it definitely looks to still be aiming for the younger crowd. more recently they’ve shown off that it’s also going to include some of the girls from splash star, which is a stranger well to pull from as splash star has been oft maligned for being a stepchild sequel to the original series and performed relatively poorly when it first aired, unlike yes 5 which brought audiences back. looking over the site credits reveals that inagami akira will be doing character design here again after being absent in that capacity since futari wa and splash star, despite being one of the few names to have still worked on every precure series up to this point (mostly as an AD or KA). that probably means that honoka and nagisa will also show up in some capacity here, but it really means there is exactly one thing I’ll be looking for if everyone gets to transform as adults: loose socks.

Loose socks in Futari wa Pretty Cure
Loose socks in Pretty Cure Splash Star

mahoutsukai is also getting a sequel series, which is instead a sweeping demographic play: it’s airing on the animazing block managed by asahi, much like the revival of tokyo mew mew that returned in a late night slot. that speaks pretty obviously to who it’s aimed at, when precure has otherwise aired in the same sunday morning 8 AM slot on TV asahi ever since it started there twenty years ago replacing ojamajo doremi. it’s personally not one of my absolute favorites, but mahoutsukai has ranked as one of the most heralded series among the male otaku/big friend crowd, and with precure seeing a slide in every measurable metric in recent years it seems toei is more outwardly aware of that fact than ever. when 25% of new toy sales now go to adults, no one should be surprised.

against that backdrop, hirogaru precure is still chugging away, being the first precure to feature a male cure. this was one of those things that was snidely rumored for as long as I’ve been following precure regularly, so it is a little surreal to see it become reality. the show immediately shipped him with the fashionable oneesan cure that wants to be a nursery school teacher. he’s a good bird boy and I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turning out.

precure was never directly made for me at any point in time that I’ve watched it, and so it has never really been my place or concern to argue that a series didn’t appeal to me. that being said, these plays are the weird ones that precure needs to find audiences again and I’m interested to see how successfully they shake out.