U.S. Moviegoers Would Rather Watch ‘Demon Slayer’ TV Episodes Than American Films
Anime is becoming a constant and hard-to-ignore presence on the U.S. box office charts. A little over two months after Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron debuted in first place, another animated entry from Japan has opened in second place.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – To the Hashira Training, directed by Haruo Sotozaki and produced by Ufotable, could not be more different than the Miyazaki film. In fact, it’s not technically even a film. Rather, it’s a compilation of episodes from the action-adventure tv series Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba, including an advance screening of a new episode from the upcoming season.
To the Hashira Training launched with an estimated $11.5 million, outperforming last year’s episodic compilation release, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – To the Swordsmith Village, which earned $10.1m over its first weekend. Demon Slayer also enjoyed the highest per-theater average – $5,938 – of any film in the U.S. top 10, easily beating its nearest competitor, Bob Marley: One Love, which had a $3,753 average.
To the Hashira Training picked up an additional $17m internationally from 56 territories for a global total of $28.5 million.
Any way you slice these numbers, it’s a fantastic win for Sony, which will soon release the new Demon Slayer season on Crunchyroll. It’s also an indictment of how badly American film studios have misplayed the domestic market. Decade after decade, U.S. producers ignored the teen market, instead focusing exclusively on children’s and family entertainment. Now, as the animation market has matured and younger generations demand animation into adulthood, U.S. film studios have nothing to offer, leaving the door open for countries like Japan to dominate the teen animation marketplace.
Other new releases
IFC Films launched the hybrid live-action/animated Stopmotion in 384 theaters and pulled in $330,398 for a respectable average of $860 per theater. The film marks the live-action feature debut of British stop-motion auteur Robert Morgan, who is known for animated shorts like Bobby Yeah and The Cat with Hands. We’ll have more extensive coverage of the film on Cartoon Brew soon.
Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Classics dropped the Spanish-led European co-pro They Shot the Piano Player in two theaters and picked up $8,075. Based on the true-life story of a Brazilian pianist who disappeared in 1976 under mysterious circumstances, the film is directed by the Oscar-nominated duo of Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (Chico and Rita).
Migration
Migration was in the top five U.S. movies for a remarkable 10th weekend in a row. The film managed to secure fifth place with just $3m (estimated).
Pre-pandemic, a $3 million weekend would not have guaranteed a top five slot. In fact, I looked back at the historical numbers for all of the same February weekends and the last time pre-pandemic that a film managed to enter the top five with $3 million or less was in 1995.
So, let’s acknowledge the reality. The American box office hasn’t fully recovered since the pandemic, and if you believe Disney CEO Bob Iger, viewing patterns have evolved permanently and the U.S. theatrical market is unlikely to ever fully recover.
Within that context, Migration can be considered a win for Illumination and distributor Universal, which is showing that it can perform solidly with original concepts and characters. This weekend, Migration passed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, to become the fourth-highest grossing animation release of 2023 with $120.4 million to date. That’s a remarkable multiplier of 9.3x from its three-day opening of $12.4m.
Globally, the film has grossed $268.7m, ahead of Disney’s Wish which is at $249.7m global. The difference: Migration is far more profitable because it carried a production cost of $72m, while Wish’s production was in the neighborhood of $200m.
Boonie Bears: Time Twist (China)
China’s film market is a different narrative than the domestic story. Boonie Bears: Time Twist, the tenth entry in the series, picked up $21.9m over the weekend in China. The film has now grossed $256.9m, all from a single country. Notably, Boonie Bears has now become China’s first billion-dollar theatrical animation franchise, with the 10 films in the series having grossed over $1.1 billion to date.