Sells 1.18 million tickets as 1st Japanese film at #1 since 2004’s Howl’s Moving Castle.

Makoto Shinkai‘s your name. (Kimi no Na wa.) anime film ranked #1 at the South Korean box office over the weekend. From the film’s Wednesday premiere to Sunday, the film has sold 1.18 million tickets for the equivalent of US$8.1 million. 837,556 of those tickets were sold during the weekend.

The film also ranked #1 on its opening day last Wednesday, having sold 130,000 tickets to earn 100 million yen (about US$859,000). The last time a Japanese film topped the box office in South Korea was when Studio Ghibli‘s Howl’s Moving Castle film premiered in 2004. Shinkai’s film opened on 555 screens in South Korea, which is a new record for a Japanese film. South Korea lifted its ban on Japanese films in 1998.

The film screened at the 18th Bucheon International Animation Film Festival in October, and won both the Special Distinction Prize and the Audience Prize for the feature film category. It is the first film of its category to win both awards.

The anime film rose from #7 to #3 at the box office in Japan in its 19th weekend. Shinkai’s film has sold a total of about 17,350,000 tickets in Japan to earn about 22.4 billion yen (US$192.5 million).

your name. is now the fourth highest-grossing film of all time in Japan, the second highest-grossing Japanese film, and the second highest-grossing anime film. The only Japanese film to gross higher is Spirited Away (30.8 billion yen).

The film is slated to open in 92 countries and territories, including in the United States through Funimation in the first quarter of this year.

Shinkai’s latest film had topped the Japanese charts for nine straight weekends since it opened on August 26, and in its 10th weekend dropped to #2 to Death Note Light up the NEW world, before regaining the top spot in its 11th weekend, and it stayed at the top spot in its 12th and 13th weekends.

Sources: Variety (Sonia Kil), Yonhap News Agency (Shim Sun-ah)

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