- It’s Japanese drama ratings time! Galileo saw another small decline in its 3rd week, though it’s still very strong at 21.3 rating (yes, I realize that the 4th week has already been shown, and we’ll look at that next week). Fuji’s 3rd Saturday 11pm drama SP premiered to a fairly strong 14.5 rating, which makes it the strongest premiere ratings for that time slot (Liar Game premiered at 12.3 and Life premiered at a 11 rating.). The challenge now is whether word-of-mouth will carry like the previous two dramas have.

Meanwhile, Iryu 2 rebounded slightly to a 15.8 for the 4th week, Hatachi No Koibito dipped all the way to a 7.4 rating, Joshi Deka continues its fall to an 8.4 rating for its 3rd week, but Takashi Sorimachi’s Dream Again does manage to rebound slightly to a 10.0 rating in its 4th week.

All Japanese drama information on Tokyograph

- In American Film Market news, both buyers and sellers are complaining about the slow start. This is, of course, due to the constant stream of film markets happening not only in Asia, but also in Rome.

Meanwhile, since I’m a Hong Kong blogger, why would I not include a link about a panel on Hong Kong? Of course, it’s going to be about lots and lots of co-productions.

- Then in your daily Andrew Lau news, the Weinstein Company decides to give Lau another Hollywood movie to work on, even though his first Hollywood movie hasn’t even been released in Hong Kong.

Sorry this is a truncated version of the usual posts, despite having lots of news out there. We’ll try to do things more normally tomorrow.

- The Hong Kong websites couldn’t deliver the Hong Kong box office stats in time, so I’ll just do it myself thanks to Box Office Mojo. As predicted from the opening day gross, the relay film Triangle was a weak number 1 opener with almost HK$2.4 million from 36 screens over Thursday to Sunday. Considering the film opened with only HK$420,000 on Thursday, this means the adult audience (read: older film buffs) showed up over the weekend.

Lust, Caution passed the HK$40 million mark. Yawn.

Not sure if this is accurate, but Brothers apparently lost another 71% of its business, but at least it has gone past the HK$10 million that would qualify this as a moderate hit.

Anyone cares about how the limited releases did? Good, me neither.

- The Japanese box office was pretty huge this past weekend, as Eiga Consultant predicted correctly that Resident Evil 3 would indeed win the weekend. In fact, the third movie actually opened at 117% of the opening for the second film with 598 million yen. However, the opening for Always 2, while only at second place, was actually stronger in terms of comparing it with the series. At 474 million yen, the opening for the second film is nearly 150% of the opening of the first film, which became both a critical and a commercial hit.

The surprise is “cell phone novel” adaptation Koizora, which opened at 3rd place with 476 million yen. This is not only thanks to a dominant female audience (88% of total audience), but it was also thanks to the 10 to 20-year-old demographic, which made up 78.2% of the total audience.

Despite three big movies dominating, Takashi Miike’s Crows: Episode Zero only lost 26.5% of its audience in its second week. Blockbuster Hero is starting to lose its audience fast, losing 40% in box office gross. With 7.8 billion yen in the bank, it’s not likely the drama adaptation will hit the 10 billion yen mark Fuji had hope for, and the 15 billion forecast producer Chihiro Kameyama wants is something he made up while stoned.

- In South Korean box office, Hero opened with the highest amount of screens for a Japanese film in Korea, but with a limited target audience (read: People who know the established characters), it was nowhere near the opening for Sinking of Japan at only 128,000 admissions. Meanwhile, Le Grand Chef, which I guess you can make the vague Tezza connection because it shares the same original comic author, opens at number 1.

Once again, the top 3 films are Korean films, which suggests Korean films are taking back the year, but of course, there will always be people ready to blame the industry downturn on piracy. Still, give them credit for finally using “lack of creativity” as one of the reasons.