The Motion Picture Producers Association of Japan announced their final box office tally for 2008 today. No prizes for guessing which film topped the list: Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Gake no Ue no Ponyo) left everything else trailing in its wake, raking in approximately 15.50 billion yen (over US$172 million at current exchange rates). That was twice as much as the second highest-ranking film, TV spin-off Boys Over Flowers: Final (Hana Yori Dango Final, 7.75 billion yen). It was a bumper year for homegrown cinema in general, mind you. Other domestic flicks that hit gold at the box office included Suspect X (Yôgisha X no Kenshin, 4.92 billion yen), Partners: The Movie (Aibô Gekijôban, 4.44 billion yen), the first installment of 20th Century Boys (20 Seiki Shônen, 3.95 billion yen) and The Magic Hour (Za Majikku Awâ, 3.92 billion yen).
Hollywood, by contrast, didn't fare nearly so well. While admissions for domestic films were up 22%, they dropped by 24% for foreign movies. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out top, at 5.71 billion yen, followed closely by Red Cliff Part 1 at 5.05 billion yen - an unusually strong showing for an Asian film. Perhaps more surprisingly, US megahit The Dark Knight wheezed in at Number 16 in the foreign film rankings, with a mere 1.60 billion yen. To put things in perspective, that's even less than the godawful Jumper managed. I guess Hayden Christensen's onscreen visit to Tokyo paid off.
Good for them.
Ponyo was most definitely enjoyable, and since Ghibli is such a household name in japan support for it is truly epic. I can't say the same about Hana Yori Dango though, to me the film had very little aesthetic and entertainment value.
I guess Japan is one of the very few countries that prefers its own product over American movies?
Yes, I believe Mononoke Hime wiped the floor (er, deck?) of Titanic back in 1997.
Korea, Japan and Bollywood. After that, pretty much everyone else is trying to be Hollywood.
It will be a sad day when these countries trade away their cultural autonomy for corn syrup.
the TV-spinoff trend is getting worrisome though. a koichi sato-starring police drama is showing on both TV and theater screens, each version handles a different part/perspective of the same story (cops vs. suspects)! very smart cross-promotion though.
@Kurt Halfyard: It was actually the other way around. Mononoke Hime was the Japanese box office champ until Titanic showed up. Of course, Miyazaki got the last laugh later on with Spirited Away, which easily sunk Cameron's ship, and is still the biggest box office success in Japanese history.
Korea...not so much anymore... Think China
At least Japanese understood that Dark Knight was crap. No screaming teenage Nolan's fanboys there.
I’m pretty surprised that Indy beat out Red Cliff. There was almost no buzz around Indy—maybe as much as, or less than Dark Knight—and there was huge buzz around Red Cliff.
As far as American cinema goes, I would expect that any generally crowd-pleasing film that prominently stars an actor who is in an advertising campaign at the time of the film’s release to do rather well. I expect Benjamin Button is raking it in now, as Brad Pitt has been advertising on and off for Softbank for a long time now.
Christian Bale hasn’t been in any advertising campaigns over here, and so nobody knows who he is. I saw a woman visit the set of the new Terminator film on TV the other day, and the general feeling when she got back to the studio was sort “That’s nice!” while giving off the impression of bafflement as to why anyone would be excited about the film. Hana Yori Dango, on the other hand, stars a bunch of young boy-band kids and their friends, who are constantly being pimped in all manner of media, so of course it’s going to be successful.
I may just be a bit jaded, but I think the Ponyo theme song had as much to do with it’s success as respect for Miyazaki’s name and work did...
@James: No, I think you are right about the lack of marketing for Ponyo. But the song was massive. For a while it felt like everytime I walked around the city someone was singing it to themselves or amongst friends, as well as any number of comedians working it into their acts.
As for people going to see Batman for Bale, I don’t think they did, no. But if anything was going to draw Japanese audiences in, it’d have to be him, right? I can’t imagine anyone being able to make the Nolan links in their heads, and Heath Ledger hadn’t quite hit Japan yet, if he was ever going to with the roles he was choosing...
Anyway, I never really wanted to join the debate on Batman specifically. I just get the feeling that in Japan, marketing actually has a lot of power when compared to word-of-mouth. But more than that, making extra connections points to people’s lives like Daniel Radcliffe spending a day in an all girl high school for a TV special or having your star in a couple high-profile advertising campaigns—like Brad Pitt now or Orlando Bloom back when Pirates 3 came out—can make a huge difference.
Bleah. I ramble. This is just my impression from a street-level perspective.
All up I think your post’s title is quite correct.
Can't argue with any of that. Looking at the Top 10 foreign films list, it correlates pretty closely with my (sketchy and totally subjective) recollections of how pervasive the advertising campaigns for each one were. I'm not sure how it looked outside Tokyo, but I found it hard to get away from Indy, Red Cliff and I Am Legend during my daily commute. Still, it pains me to see that The Mummy III did better business than Kung Fu Panda.
A bit sad that most of them are movie versions of tv shows ("hana yori...", "aiboh", etc.) Even "ponyo" is practically owned by Yomiuri Group, Japan's biggest media corporation (same thing goes to "Magic Hour" and Fuji-Sankei Group.) There's no place to independent movies. As the infamous critic Osugi noted, the Japanese trust religiously on the TV media, so if you want to make it in Japan, got to be submitted through its filter. No wonder why Avril Lavigne (probably the only one foreign artist capable to go multi-platinum today in Japan) performs even in dumb morning shows here.