July 2nd, 2008
The Golden Rock - July 2nd, 2008 Edition.
- Our first and foremost jobs here at Lovehkfilm is to review movies, and we got some of those for you today. Boss Kozo has a review of Lawrence Lau/Scud’s City Without Baseball, a review of Korean hand ball flick Forever the Moment, a review of the Taiwanese film Soul of a Demon, and a review of Japanese dark comedy Funuke, Show Some Love, You Losers!. JMaruyama offers a review of Kwak Jae-Young’s Cyborg She, which he insists is a remake of Park Chan Wook’s I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK, and that’s OK too. I myself offer a review of Don’t Laugh at My Romance and a review of cute puppy film A Tale of Mari and Three Puppies.
- It’s Japanese Oricon charts time! As expected, Arashi’s theme for the Hana Yori Dango movie debuted at the top, with an impressive 300,000+ copies sold. Shuchishin (aka the “stupid boy band”. Really, that’s their nickname) not only survived to their second single, but also manage to sell 200,000+ copies of it. The album chart was also fairly crowded, with GReeeN!!! taking the top position for the first week of their second album, Ayaka’s 2nd following close behind, and Ketsumeishi debuting at a somewhat disappointing 3rd place. My newest idol Jero debuts at 5th with his first album.
- China loves Kung Fu Panda, as it has already become the most successful animated film ever in China with a box office take nearing 100 million yuan after 10 days. I don’t get that two days’ delay in Sichuan, though, which sounds more like distributor’s indecision more than anything else.
The earthquake didn’t exactly affect people’s moviegoing mood anyway, as May’s box office is up 26% from the previous year, prompting China Film Group to post a cryptic message that seem to spell either showing off or amazement.
- The Japanese news shows were all over a Wall Street Journal story this morning, which compared the rather unpopular Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda with current TV Prime Minister Kimura Takuya. Click on the first link, since going directly to the site won’t let you read the whole story.
- Kaiju Shakedown’s Grady Hendrix looks at what’s going with The Warlords‘ western distribution ambitions, which has now dwindled down to a butchered DVD release.
- A bit late: Jason Gray offers a look by Midnight Eye’s Jasper Sharp on how Tartan UK came to meet their current fate of closing down.
- Lionsgate will be working with CJ Entertainment for Korean Wedding, aka “How Another White Man Falls in Love with Asian Girl and Finds Asian Culture Funny”.
- Taiwan may take a very significant step in continuing to improve relations with China by lifting their ban on Mainland Chinese performers, even though Taiwanese performers have been performing in the Mainland for years.
- An ad sales slump for Japanese television is causing board member of these TV stations to go from earning tons of money to earning just lots of money.
- After the success of the Ayaka-Kobukuro duet Winding Road, their record company is back for round two with another duet to be released.
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Personally, we don’t really like remake. Filmmakers should produce their own original films, that’s not that hard to come out with original ideas isn’t it?
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:07 am
In your post about Japan weekend B.O. you mention that HYD opening was 99% of Hero opening. But according to BoxOfficeMojo, Hero opening weekend was 8.709 and HYD was 9, so are you sure you aren’t mixing things up? I mean, Hero opening was 99% of HYD’s. Or is BoxOfficeMojo wrong? I dunno, I’m confused.
And also, you say that when admission is higher but the $$ made is less, that probably means most of the movie audience was very young. That’s wrong. Because HERO was in 475 theatres and HYD is in 400. Plus, HYD screen average is 24.000 while Hero was 18.336. So yeah…
Are you sure the info in your last post wasn’t wrong?
http://boxofficemojo.com/intl/japan/?yr=2007&wk=36&p=.htm
http://boxofficemojo.com/intl/japan/?yr=2008&wk=26&p=.htm
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:20 am
Hi, Andre,
If you look at the exchange rate, they are drastically different for the two weekends. That’s why I always report the figures in yen, because Box Office Mojo uses a different exchange rate every week, hence skewing their dollar figures.
Hero - USD$8,709,670 x 113.434 yen= 987972706 yen.
Hana Yori Dango - USD$9,631,782 x 106.168 yen= 1022587031.376 yen
But yes, in this sense, it seems like my source (Eiga Consultant) either has the figures wrong, or Box Office Mojo has it wrong, or it’s my Japanese problem.
As for admission is higher, but less money. I actually had the official admissions, and I simply divided that with the total figures to get an average ticket price each person paid. A movie that attracts a larger adult audience would see a much larger average ticket price, since the difference between a student ticket and an adult ticket is 300 yen. Using figures I have:
Hana Yori Dango - approx. 850,000 admissions/1022587031.376 yen = 1206 yen average ticket price.
Gururi no Koto (source: http://eigaconsultant.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2008/06/post_a624.html) - 4033 admissions/6,250,000 yen = 1549 yen average ticket price.
This means Hana Yori Dango brought in more people per screen. But since Gururi no Koto was playing only on 2 screens, it had a higher per-screen average because people paid more for a ticket.
Per-screen average simply means how much money each theater brought in. It doesn’t clearly represent how many people actually went to see the movie, which is why I always argued that people who report box office stats need to reveal both admission figures and dollar figures to get a true sense of what film is bringing in what people. If Hero has a lower admission figures, as well as lower per-screen average, then one can say Hero appealed to a similar age group (because of Kimura Takuya).