kamilleblu wrote:The Japanese box office analyst I follow...
Who is that, if you don't mind me asking? Always hungry for more box office analyzation for Japan.
kamilleblu wrote:...said they were more treated like a late night anime film than a hit or blockbuster.
If only comparing it to what Toho can do for a film, they are the most powerful Japanese distributor, or the treatment given to the US blockbusters (which you can do a whole article on why the US films will always get much more theaters than the Japanese ones): this is true. If we look at all the studios, though, that would mean certain studios almost exclusively do "late night film" style releases.
For example, counting backwards from today to look at 2019 releases, here are the theater counts for the last five movies distributed by Shochiku that ranked in the top ten (lazy title translations by me):
- Movie Boys ~ 158 theaters
- Osomatsu-san the Movie ~ 126 theaters
- Ultraman R/B The Movie: Select! The Crystal of Bond ~ 105 theaters
- Love Live Sunshine! The School Idol Movie Over the Rainbow ~ 128 theaters
- Such a Late Night Banana or Beloved True Story ~ 330 theaters
Of those, only one eclipsed the theater count of the Anime trilogy.
kamilleblu wrote:...City on the Edge of Battle (got the least promotion from what I can tell)...
You can read this report from Nicholas, who saw the movie in Japan, as an anecdotal vouch for that:
https://www.tohokingdom.com/blog/godzil ... pressions/
kamilleblu wrote:Looking at the numbers you provided for the Millennium films, it seems like the anime films were only given just over half of what films like Godzilla Final Wars received.
Yeah this has motivated me to crunch more numbers. It's not in question that Toho gave these less theaters than a normal movie of this pedigree. Comparing it to other science fiction films from Toho, the only one I found that got less theaters was the 2009 movie
Go Find a Psychic! ...which also did pretty bad at the box office. That said, not finished looking at data for all of them. Might move on to compare it to other anime releases next.
EDIT: So after further research I discovered I was wrong. When I was quoting the earlier Godzilla films, that was not theater count... that was screen count. Their theater count would be less, for example Godzilla Resurgence was on 441 screens across 348 theaters. Finding theater count for the earlier Godzilla movies is proving tough, though. Likewise I'm not able to find a screen count for the Godzilla anime trilogy. So this is an apples to oranges comparison at the moment, except for the fact that the stated screens means the theater count would be less than those numbers.
If it bites... don't mess with it!