Macross is one of the finest and most influential anime of all time, but for over 20 years the international distribution of the series’ later instalments—basically everything made after 1995's Macross Plus—has been held hostage by a fierce legal struggle between several companies.
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We wrote an explainer on the whole mess back in 2013 if you want to catch up in detail, but the tl;dr version is that when the American company Harmony Gold licensed the original Macross back in the early 80s for a Western release (as part of the compendium series Robotech), they thought they were getting the international rights to every Macross series that would ever be released subsequently, which triggered various legal battles between them and Tatsunoko Productions, Studio Nue and the advertising company Big West, who argued they absolutely were not.
Those battles have raged ever since, and are the reason that no Macross series from the last 20 years—including the outstanding Macross Zero—has ever seen an official international release.
Until now! Harmony Gold and Big West just announced today that they’ve finally made peace, issuing a statement on the official Macross site that reads (emphasis mine):
