Oct 22 2020, 05:29 PM, updated 6y ago
The huge haul for “Demon Slayer” showed how audiences can quickly return in countries where they feel safe to head to theaters.
TOKYO — In the United States, movies are being shown to seas of empty seats, if theaters are opening at all. But in Japan, an animated film just had the biggest box office weekend in the country’s history — by far.
The movie, “Demon Slayer: Mugen Train,” based on a smash-hit Japanese comic book, had been hotly anticipated for months by both fans and an industry desperate to get moviegoers back in front of big screens amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The film outperformed all expectations, more than doubling the country’s record for the largest opening weekend, with over 3.4 million people shelling out nearly $44 million on tickets. In what may be a first for Japan, the movie had the biggest opening in the world last weekend — more than all other countries combined — despite having debuted only domestically.
There isn’t much competition right now, as one Hollywood studio after another has pushed back big-budget releases. The magnitude of the film’s success would have been an outlier even under normal circumstances, but it has special significance during the pandemic, showing how rapidly audiences may return once they feel safe spending hours sitting among strangers in crowded spaces.
Japan has kept coronavirus cases and deaths low, with a relatively light touch that relies on contact tracing and appeals to a national sense of social responsibility. While infections are soaring again in much of the West, the daily number of new cases in Japan has stayed below 800 since the end of August, and in Tokyo, daily life, at least on the surface, has mostly returned to normal.
For many who saw “Demon Slayer” over the weekend, it was their first time returning to the theater since April, when the government declared a brief national emergency over concerns about rising cases of the virus. For the country’s top politicians, the startling box office numbers were a barometer for Japan’s weathering of the pandemic and its efforts to restart the economy.
The comic book, or manga, on which the movie is based is part of a 22-volume series that has become a national phenomenon. In the four years since its launch, it has sold over 100 million copies, making it one of the most successful manga of all time.
The comics have been turned into a popular anime series that has found fans worldwide, and “Demon Slayer” characters decorate everything from rice balls to train livery in Japan.
“This particular title cuts across generations. Even people over 40, over 50, really like ‘Demon Slayer,’” said Roland Kelts, a visiting professor of media studies at Waseda University in Tokyo and the author of the book “Japanamerica.”
The series is “quite sentimental, but it’s well done,” he said, adding that it had “been very clever about building an audience and sustaining it” through online streaming services.
“Demon Slayer” has found plenty of space on Japan’s theater screens. The only major foreign production playing in Japanese cinemas last weekend was “Tenet,” the Christopher Nolan film about time-traveling spies, which opened in the country in mid-September.
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Good series. Manga ending made me shed many manly tears. 😭
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