Deadline London has a post up on the 47 Ronin Japan Box Office numbers with an update and more insight into that market. The actual box office numbers were lower than first reported with 47 Ronin earning $1.05M. However, Deadline offers the following insight:
It is still the top film from a major for the weekend in a territory that is notoriously keen on local pics. Insiders say the Japan result is “not a catastrophic hit” for the studio’s financial year with accounting adjustments having been anticipated. Although the result is an underperform, I’m cautioned that “Japan is the kind of market where opening weekend doesn’t necessarily forecast the rest of the film’s run.”
…Japan can be a thorny territory. It lost its standing as the world’s No. 2 movie market when it was outpaced by China in 2012. And Japanese films have consistently been dominant at home since 2008, hitting a 47-year high of 65.7% in 2012. Tastes have changed over the years as moviegoers seek lighter fare. Among the films that are performing more strongly than 47 Ronin was Lupin vs. Conan, an animated TV series adaptation, the likes of which often have a built-in success factor. An exec in Japan told me this summer, “Almost every hit movie is related to TV.” Or they’re animated and franchise pics. That’s borne out by the fact that this year, of the top 10 films in Japan, only two are from Hollywood. One is animated sequel Monsters University and the other is Ted, the Universal pic that hails from Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane. Based on an 18th century Japanese legend, 47 Ronin skewed to older audiences.
The article is here.
Note: Thank you Nancy Tartaglione for taking the time to find out how the Japanese market operates and putting the 47 Ronin box office numbers into perspective rather than going straight to gloom and doom.
Update: CinemaBlend has provided further context in their post on the 47 Ronin Japanese box office returns. They have said the following:
47 Ronin only opened on 333 screens, earning a per-screen average of around $3,900, which is respectable. Japanese audiences tend to flock to locally produced films which are often either animated or based on other franchises, such as TV shows.