Jul 17, 2023

Box Office Report: Opening Weekend for Hayao Miyazaki, Impressive Legs for "Elemental," and Two Chinese Hits

With the summer movie season in full swing, audiences continue to prove that there is plenty of room in movie theaters for animation.

Animated films are making strong debuts and enjoying the limelight in China, North America, and Japan, the world's three largest box office markets.

Hayao Miyazaki's latest and perhaps last animated feature, "The Boy and the Hare" (formerly titled "How Do You Live?"), grossed 1.83 billion yen ($13.2 million) in its first weekend in Japanese theaters. In yen terms, it surpassed "Howl's Moving Castle" (1.48 billion yen) to become Ghibli's largest opening weekend ever. In US dollar terms, due to the unpredictability of the exchange rate, Howl's debut was slightly higher at $14M.

The Boy and the Hare also set a new 3-day Japanese IMAX opening weekend record (live action and animation) with ¥236M ($1.7M) on 44 screens.

The film's Japanese box office performance was enough to place "The Boy and the Hare" in ninth place at the worldwide box office for the weekend. This is an impressive performance for a film that famously had no promotion, no press screenings, and no trailers prior to its release. Ghibli did not even release a synopsis of the film prior to its release, allowing audiences to enjoy the film without knowing anything about it.

No specific U.S. release date for "The Boy and the Hare" has been announced, but GKIDS announced last week that it has acquired North American distribution rights to the film and will release it in the United States this year.

Despite debuting with Pixar's second-worst box office weekend, Peter Thorne's "Elemental" was the comeback title of the summer. Domestically, the film earned an additional $8.7 million in its fifth weekend, bringing its lifetime box office to $125.2 million, ahead of "Lightyear" ($118.3 million) and "The Good Dinosaur" ($123 million).

Internationally, "Elemental" earned an additional $28.2M over the weekend, bringing its worldwide box office to $36.9M. Its total box office was $311.7M, surpassing the lifetime gross of "Lightyear" ($226.4M) and closing in on "The Good Dinosaur" ($332.2M).

With small children and family competitions in full swing, the film could continue to do well through the rest of the month and into August, and it would not be surprising if it approaches $400M before all is said and done.

The animated Chinese historical epic "Chang'an" grossed $43.8 million at the weekend, ranking second in the region and third worldwide. It grossed $94.9 million in its first nine days of release.

Set in the Tang Dynasty, the film is an action epic that mixes mythology and history and is billed as the first in a series of new cultural films based on Chinese history by producer Light Chaser Animation. It is also said to be one of the longest films in Chinese animation history at 168 minutes.

Another Chinese film, Oh My School! is a feature-length adaptation of a local animated series, which debuted in the world's top 10 over the weekend. The film's $12.8 million box office took it to fifth place in China and tenth place overall worldwide. Directed by Xia Mingze and Yang Cai, Oh My School! is a body-swapping comedy in which a strict teacher and an awkward student are forced to walk a mile in each other's shoes.

Sony's Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had a strong domestic weekend, grossing $6 million in its seventh week. The film's domestic gross now stands at $368.8, almost double the original's $190.2M domestic gross. The worldwide gross for Across the Spider-Verse has reached $663.5M.

Unlike "Elemental," DreamWorks' "Ruby Gilman: Teenage Kraken" failed to make any kind of comeback after a historically poor opening, earning only $1M in its third week of release in North America. Its domestic total is $14.4 million and its worldwide total is $34.2 million.