December 4th, 2008
The Golden Rock - December 3rd, 2008 Edition
Let’s start with some numbers:
- The attendance ranking for the Japanese box office looks a bit different from actual grosses. While the top three films match on both charts, Death Race actually made enough money to overtake the Pretty Cure movie for 4th place. This is most likely because Pretty Cure attracts younger audiences, which means Pretty Cure may have attracted more audiences, but it sold tickets at lower prices. The same happened to Suspect X, which apparently attracted more audience than Saw V, but ended up taking in less money. Which one is a more accurate gauge of success at the box office? You decide.
As it is the case after a holiday weekend, all the films on the top 10 took a considerable drop. Red Cliff lost more audiences than the war crimes drama I’d Rather be a Shellfish (31.6% vs. 26.6%), which lost the least business out of all the films on top 10. However, it didn’t lose enough to lose its first place standing. John Woo’s period epic has now topped the box office for five weeks, and 58% of Walker Plus users who saw the film gave it 5 out of 5.
The film that lost the most business on the top 10 is Blindness, whose gross dropped by 50% in the second week. In fact, Where the Legend Lives attracted enough elder audiences that it bumped Blindness off the top10 on the attendance chart.
- In Korea, five of the top 10 films are Korean, with two of those films taking the top spots. However, one of them is only for a series of preview screenings, and its true opening will be next weekend.
- At the Chinese box office, local film Fit Lover scores a strong opening, though last week’s top earner Desire of the Heart lost only 20% of business. Dante Lam’s Beast Stalkers amazing lost only 0.2% of its opening weekend business and may become a pretty damn profitable film for all the production companies involved. Hellboy II also saw a very small drop of about 7%, which must be good news for those who want to bring more fantasy films into China.
The biggest drops also go to Hollywood films - Quantum of Solace lost 60%, while Babylon A.D. lost a disastrous 75%. However, one has already made nearly 140 million RMB, and the other one has only made 7.75 million RMB.
- On the Japanese Oricon music charts, the variety group Exile (only two out of the seven member sing - the rest dance in the background) scores a new number 1 single with their cover of Last Christmas (seriously, when will Japanese people get tired of that song? The last cover was Yuji Oda’s for the drama of the same name back in 2004). The enka song Ai no Mama de climbed back up to 9th place, making enka singer Junko Akimoto the oldest female singer/enka singer to have a top 10 single.
Mika Nakashima’s latest album debuts on top of the album chart, while Shota Shimizu’s 2nd place debut got the media searching everywhere for a new record for him to break.
- The boost of Ai no Mama de in sales may be due to its win at the Japan Record Awards as one of the 12 Gold Awards of the year. Other winners include Jero as one of the five Best New Artists, Namie Amuro’s compilation taking Best Album (how can a compilation be a Best Album when it’s compiled from a bunch of other albums?), and Ponyo poised to pick up some kind of award
Worth noting is that Hong Konger Agnes Chan will be getting a special award. Agnes Chan was born in Hong Kong and was first known in Asia after she acted in to of Chang Cheh’s films. Then she went to Japan for a singing career and it mostly stayed there ever since. Over the last decade, she also became a scholar(a Ph.D from Stanford!), a professor, a novelist, a United Nations ambassador, a TV personality, and a radio host. Despite being in Japan, she never forgot about Hong Kong, either.
- Cape No. 7 was supposed to open in a few weeks in China, but its release has now been postponed indefinitely, despite being approved by the censors. However, no one really knows the true reason. Some say the Taiwanese-Japanese aspect of the film could cause a nationalistic backlash (as in people reading too much into it), and some say it’s a simple matter of the subtitles not being done on time because of all the languages involved.
- Alan Mak and Felix Chong, whose latest film Lady Cop and Papa Crook will finally be released in January (though in a trucated, China-approved version), are already working on a new project about police eavesdropping that will be produced by Derek Yee. Sounds promising.
- Under “Japanese drama” news today, the NHK period drama hit Atsuhime hit a peak of 30.8% rating, a mark that private network dramas have not hit since Karei Naru Ichizoku did it in March 2007 with its final episode.
With struggling drama ratings even during prime time, TBS will be canceling their daytime drama slots and the news show programmed around them for a 4-hour daytime news show. Honestly, these news show are all the same anyway, no matter how long they are or what network they’re on.
- Ryuganji is back with a detailed look of his experience at this year’s Tokyo Filmex.
While Sion Sono’s 4-hour Love Exposure got all the attention, Twitch also brings to your attention Nonko 36 sai, another well-received Japanese film at the festival.
- Despite the current economic environment, major Japanese studio Toei is spending 4.2 billion yen on a complex completely for digital production.
- Lastly, Twitch has a review for Shinobu Yaguchi’s Happy Flight.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:10 am
It seems like a pretty good weekend for the two underdeveloped movie industries, China and Korea…with all domestic movies taking a fairly substantial part in the market.
Those numbers look different from what I read though for the Chinese market.
The gross was 3.6 million USD for Fit Lover. Desires of the Heart seems right however, as it was said to have made five million more yuan than Fit Lover in its total ten day gross. I forget which day fit lover opened though, so maybe it made more than what’s stated because it opened before the weekend started.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:18 am
And wow, that is so unbelievably crazy that the top films in Japan and China made about the same amount. Wow, that completely shocked me when I looked at those numbers.
I know that Fit Lover is probably a monster hit in China, and that this was a lackluster weekend in Japan but still! That’s crazy…
Hopefully China can loosen up film restrictions really fast so that the film quality can catch up to its potential. I don’t like SARFT but I’m kind of glad that they restrict foreign movies to only twenty a year. The Chinese film industry is so young, and needs some babying before it can compete with too much.
It’s too bad about Cape No 7…the later it gets pushed back the harder it’ll be for it to make money in China bc everyone will be going to see Mei Lan Fang, or If You Are the One.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Hi, Dana,
There’s nothing wrong with keeping foreign films down to baby the local industry (South Korea is one successful example), but to limit it based on content is something that’s never cool.
As for Japan, blockbusters actually make sometimes double that in their first weekend, although the same can be said for China. However, if you look at the dates covered on the Box Office Mojo stats, they actually cover an entire week of grosses. Their stats for Japan, on the other hand, only cover two days, since Saturday is the traditional opening day there. So it’s not that shocking that the numbers might be similar, considering the number of screens in China and the ticket price in Japan.
December 10th, 2008 at 5:25 am
That’s kind of what I meant though. Despite the censorship, there’s at least something good that comes from it, no big loss without some small gain, that kind of thing.
I didn’t quite understand what you mean by ticket price in Japan. Isn’t that much higher?