It’s official: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train has claimed the top spot in Japan’s all-time box office ranking, with a domestic cume that stands at 32.47 billion yen (USD$313 million). This moment had seemed inevitable for a while, but it is no less stunning for that.
The movie was released on October 16, shooting out of the gates to gross more than ¥10 billion in ten days; no title had done that before in the country. Since then, it has gleefully broken record after record, closing in on the top spot even as Japan — which had managed the pandemic relatively well — began to see a steep rise in cases.
This weekend, Mugen Train finally surpassed Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away (31.68 billion yen), which had held the all-time number-one spot for almost two decades. Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning classic returned to the top of the box office earlier this year as Japanese theaters reopened, and went on to add almost one billion yen to its haul. Ultimately, that wasn’t enough to keep it ahead of Mugen Train.