Makoto Shinkai is poised to outperform anything ever produced by Walt Disney.
Japan has a pretty robust film industry. In addition to a recent resurgence in domestically produced films, just about every international blockbuster eventually makes its way to theaters in the country.
Because of that, the weekly box office rankings tend to change pretty quickly. A new movie comes out, gets some buzz, spends a few weeks at or near the top of the list, and then gets brushed aside for newer, shinier releases. Unless, that is, the movie is Makoto Shinkai’s anime phenomenon Your Name.
Your Name was released on August 26 in Japan, meaning that moviegoers have had nearly five months in which to go see it as many times as they’d like. And yet, Shinkai’s latest is still filling up theaters. Last week, it was the number-two movie in Japan, outperforming both Rogue One and the latest Yo-kai Watch theatrical features, both of which were only released in December.
The sustained sales of Your Name tickets are significant. It’s currently the fourth-highest earning film ever in Japanese theaters, and directly above it, at number three, is Frozen. Due to Your Name’s continued success the gap between the two is getting smaller and smaller, and as of the latest reports, Your Name has earned 23.23 billion yen (US$200.26 million) to Frozen’s 25.48 billion yen.
So does Your Name have enough s to pass Disney’s musical hit? It’s looking like a definite possibility. Over the past month, Your Name added roughly 2.73 billion yen to its box office total, so some simple number crunching shows that if it can keep selling tickets at a little more than 80 percent of its current pace, one month from now, it’ll slide past Frozen. If it does, Your Name will have outperformed any Disney film ever released in Japan, adding yet another achievement to its legacy and further boosting the anticipation for Shinaki’ next project.
Source: Sankei News via Otakomu, Kogyo Tsushin via Anime News Network