Has there ever been anime with this scenario

[kadmos1]

Has there ever been anime with this scenario: An anime in Japan sells poorly with only a few hundred units (If it sold around 1000, that would be saying it sold well at all). Company does an English dub of it. The licensing cost wasn't as high as the average cost because both the Japanese and English dubbing licensing companies knew it was just one of those titles for a very niche group. It would be just a hobby series to license.

Surprisingly, it sells better both here and better than expected because the companies knew it would tank in sales here. Both were happily proved wrong. General consensus of whether dub or sub was the way to go with said title would not matter because it sold better than expected.

By sold better, I mean if the company, for example, invested it sell 2500 units, it sold a few thousand more.

I can't honestly think of a case where selling more than expected is a bad thing save for it becomes a chief property for a company and they invest too much into a title that causes to lose so much money that bankruptcy is not too far away.

[something]

A precise answer would require more behind the scenes knowledge of R1 sales and license expectations than we have. Especially the "low license fee" part. R2 sales are readily available (at least since 2000, and for shows that sell enough to rank on Oricon) but R1, not much at all.

There have been shows that were bigger successes here than in Japan, though that doesn't mean they tanked there. Cowboy Bebop is often cited as a show that really blew up in R1 well beyond what it did in Japan, but when you actually check the R2 sales, it sold spectacularly (something like 25k units?).

Even the Big O is cited as a failure in Japan that hit in the US, but frankly it was not a disaster in Japan. It averaged 4,653 per disc and a lot of shows would be ecstatic to get there. I'm sure it was expected to do better (Wiki says something about it originally being planned two cour rather than one) but it isn't a Kurokami-level catastrophe (which is kind of what you're looking for, mere hundreds of units sold).

I believe it's rare, honestly. Generally tanking is tanking and there's not a huge second wind for an anime in R1 if it was dismal failures back at home.

[One Vorlon]

This may be a bit picky, the numbers in your scenario make it very implausible. For example, if we've interpreted Bandai's source code notes correctly, we know that a dub costs about five* times as much as subtitling. And people have have posted some calculations on this site (I believe the last big one involved Fullmetal Alchemist), where they worked out the various costs for releasing an R1 anime title. Based on both, an R1 company - even the ones run by otaku - wouldn't dub a series they expected to flop (or only sell a couple of hundred units).

Now there were cases (mainly around the turn of the millenium) where an R1 company kept dubbing a series that was missing sales goals, even though the dub was eating most of the profits. But that's not quite the same.

*can anyone double check that? I'm away from my computer, and don't have my copy of the source code novella handy
. . .

There have been shows that were bigger successes here than in Japan, though that doesn't mean they tanked there. Cowboy Bebop is often cited . . .

Even the Big O is cited . . .
Didn't the same thing happened with Outlaw Star? I remember people telling me that Outlaw Star blew up so big here in the U.S., there was talk about doing a true sequel (and not just Angel Links)

[something]

Didn't the same thing happened with Outlaw Star? I remember people telling me that Outlaw Star blew up so big here in the U.S., there was talk about doing a true sequel (and not just Angel Links)
I'm not sure what its R2 sales were, since it came out in 1998 and we only have easily accessible numbers from 1999. But I wouldn't be surprised if it were a relatively bigger success here - it came out when there was barely any anime on TV at all in the US and Toonami was just exploding onto the scene. Pretty much everything from that era ended up being ten times more popular that it would have been if it came out a few years later.