For Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train, this is the endgame. In two blistering months, the anime feature has rocketed to 30 billion yen at the Japanese box office, breaking countless records on its way. It is the only title to reach this milestone other than Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away (2001), and is now poised to surpass that film and break the ultimate record, becoming the top-grossing film in Japanese history.
After 59 days on release in Japan, Mugen Train has sold 22,539,385 tickets to gross 30.3 billion yen (USD$291 million). Spirited Away stands at 30.8 billion yen. However, as the journalist Atsushi Ohara noted on Twitter, that number doesn’t include what the film grossed after its re-release earlier this year; he says the figure could be updated imminently.
Either way, Mugen Train is all but certain to surpass Spirited Away. Two things are remarkable. First, that it has caught up at lightning speed: Ghibli’s film took 253 days to gross 30 billion yen — more than four times longer than Mugen Train.