Japanese Films – After two years of pandemic disruption, the Japanese film market recovered to more or less normalcy in 2022. Hollywood produced four of the top ten box-office pictures of the year, with Tom Cruise’s action film “Top Gun: Maverick” at the top, mirroring the market share of foreign films for much of the present millennium. In 2021, when Hollywood companies effectively halted overseas distribution of their products, only one non-Japanese film, “F9: The Fast Saga,” made it to the top ten earners. Passive voice was used in this sentence by the phrase “when Hollywood companies had effectively stopped overseas distribution of their products.”
Japanese Films Mostly Get the High-Sales in 2023
Japanese Films – The First Slam Dunk
More recently, “The First Slam Dunk,” an animated film based on a long-running basketball manga, grossed $8.91 billion as of Jan. 24, seven weeks after its premiere on Dec. 2. Meanwhile, “Avatar: Way of Water,” the sequel to James Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi blockbuster, had made only 3.71 billion in the five weeks since its Dec. 16 release, failing to dethrone “The First Slam Dunk” even in its debut weekend.
Kingdom
“The highly anticipated third part of the “Kingdom” action series, based on Yasuhisa Hara’s comic and set in China during the Warring States period, is directed by the renowned Shinsuke Sato, who has a Japanese cast. The series is set to release this summer.” Furthermore, the director, Shinsuke Sato, is the top action director in the country and has also directed the popular sci-fi series “Alice in Borderland.”
“Local films by unique talents, such as Hirobumi Watanabe’s ‘Techno Brothers’ with a comedic musical mash-up score by Yuji, will keep 2023 cinematically interesting, despite the lack of recognition from Cannes.”
