Box Office Watch: Conan, Miyazaki Make Big Bucks
A couple big box office anime wins out of Japan and China this weekend.
In Japan, the new Detective Conan film — the 27th in the long-running franchise — made 3.3 billion yen in its opening weekend. The film, subtitled The Million-dollar Pentagram, broke Conan records: the previous best 3-day opening belonged to last year’s Iron Submarine.
Iron Submarine still holds the record for highest-grossing Conan film overall, with 13.8 billion yen in domestic ticket sales. We’ll see if Pentagram can surpass it in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron continues to pull in huge numbers in China, where it was released April 3. The film has so far made just over $93 million in that country. That is, for perspective, more than the film has made in either Japan or the US. Whew.
Speaking of the US, The Boy and the Heron is set to stream on Max sometime soon alongside other Ghibli titles. It’ll hit Netflix in other parts of the world, minus Japan.
